Category: Epochal Shifts

“THERE is one thing we could still ask of Herr Brandt: what exactly were you doing during those 12 years away from Germany?” Pitched in 1961, the question was timed to intercept future chancellor Willy Brandt’s rising star. The inquisitor, Franz Josef Strauss, conservative leader of the Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU), had fought in…

AMERICA goes to the polls on 3 November. The popular vote (aggregate of all votes) is trumped by an Electoral College system. Small states are kept warm to the federation by being gifted proportionally more Electoral votes than larger counterparts. Enviably, independent states act as countries within a country. By contrast, post-war statism continues to…

THE DREAM CITY megachurch Phoenix, Arizona, hosted Donald Trump last month. Supporters waited in 110-degrees for the Students for Trump event. Covid’s damage to the US economy is affecting Mr Trump’s re-election chances. 128,000 deaths are a tragedy. Politically it is clearing some of the path for rival Joe Biden. During his Arizona trip Mr…

AUTHORITY is not what it once was. In 1950s Britain it was located within social hierarchies, collectivised industries and nation-based politics. Efforts to distribute that power via popular culture were successful. My four older sisters took to Sixties culture in various forms. Our Edwardian, war-time and now late parents looked on mainly in bemusement, remaining…

English philosopher Gillian Rosemary Rose died tragically young. Her thesis is that contemporary lives are functioning in ‘the broken middle’ between the ideal and real. My thesis increasingly is senior leadership is working in this space. Between ecology and economy, law and ethics (life), church and state, theory and practice, charisma and thought and so…

Global management is falling in love with the prospect of big data as its latest ‘third-dimension’. Its scale is a possible route through the maze of business planning. But what if you combine empathy, which, fundamentally, is the ability to imagine, with the interpretation of big data? More so is the real third-dimension primarily found…

James Joyce summed up Brexiteers: “The whole Anglo-Saxon spirit… the manly independence, the unconscious cruelty, the persistence, the slow yet efficient intelligence, the sexual apathy, the calculating taciturnity.” Which I’ll come on to. But firstly, my car. It slid down a snow-covered Yorkshire hillside recently, saved only by a convenient wall. Neatly scarring both left-side passenger…

I met with my university’s ‘expert’ in Social Media this week and chatted about its rise and rise within society and inevitably within courses such as our MBA. She has the considerable challenge of engaging with academic staff to help them develop use of social media tools, both personally and within teaching activity. There is…

We want happy people in a Big Society. We want excellent schools. We want, we want… Who wants to be happy in actual fact? Do we really want excellence in an inane grinning fashion? There is something dreadful about ‘being happy and excellent’. It’s all too artificial. Some politicians’ suggestions that teachers are ‘put upon’…

The appeal of stream of consciousness writers like Faulkner, Joyce and then Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway appears to be that they removed us from the tyranny of clock time. “Clocks slay time. Time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.”  The…