Business IS Personal

British society (but not only British society) is trapped in the myth that business is business, whilst personal stuff is personal stuff.

This brings out all sorts of pretensions, such as the illusion that business deals can simply be rooted in “logic” with the consequence that the most important learning topic is “how to debate” as power is firmly in the hand of the Best Talker.

The Best Talker is the person able to talk everybody else into doing anything he or she wants.

Cue Tony Blair, and now David Cameron not by chance much on the way up compared to rhetorical troglodyte Gordon Brown.

This is truly a pity and a missed opportunity, as it removes content, ideas and personality from the main focus, in business as in politics.

The best one can hope is that invisible advisers will actually implement something good for the country, when it doesn’t interfere with the leader’s personal advantage.

That’s something more akin to Enlightened Dictatorship than to liberal democracy.

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But in truth Business is Personal. For most of us at least. Business is impersonal for bored public sector employees and stressed-out private sector middle managers (aka “Cannon Fodder”).

For everybody else, there is a reason to be engaged in business activities that goes beyond the actual performing of our particular duty.

The existence of one’s salary is often vital to the persons one cares about most, one’s family. The desire to perform well and/or to get a promotion or expand one’s business, it’s all deeply rooted in one’s own need for self-esteem and fulfillment.

Being able in one’s business to cut a deal or even keep one’s job in the face of adversity is very much personal stuff.

And that’s why logic cannot be enough. We have to recognize that in the choice of a new IT system or Managing Director or people to fire during next cost-cutting exercise, gut-feelings and emotions are just as important as what’s “rational”.

Business is Personal, and it will remain so until negotiation will only be done by machines.

The Darfur Conflict From a Different Perspective

The Dirty Political Underbelly of the Darfur Conflict by Ayesha Kajee – April 25, 2007, Pambazuka News

[…] Darfur possibly has undiscovered reserves of uranium, bauxite and copper. Geological surveys also imply that Darfur has unexploited oil reserves, which may go some way to explaining the intense and sustained global interest in Darfur over the past few years.

There is indubitably a massive humanitarian disaster in Darfur, and the mobilisation of civil society around the globe is warranted and welcome. But it is worth questioning why this tragedy receives concentrated attention from the world’s media and why advocacy for multilateral intervention in Darfur has managed to mobilise millions, including celebrities from every sphere, when similar situations in northern Uganda or Central African Republic get far less coverage […]

Given the complex internal and external political implications of the Darfur conflict, the biggest losers are the Darfuris who have been killed, maimed and driven from their homes and livelihoods.

They are the ‘dispensable’ pawns of political manipulators from within and outside Sudan.

There is a crying need for multilateral intervention in Darfur, and an enhanced peacekeeping force with a strong mandate to protect citizens would bring much needed stability to the region as a whole. But the potential ramifications of such an intervention merit careful consideration as to the composition of the deployed force and its mandate. […]

There are several things I never understood about Darfur, including why there would be several rebel movements none of which able to protect civilians, and why would the Sudan government embark into such an awful adventure immediately after freeing itself from decades-long war in the South Sudan…the above is a good start to understand the situation.

From the Neo-cons to the Neo-warms

(Letter to the IHT – published on April 28, 2007 – reply from other IHT reader published on May 2, 2007)

Dear Editors

The phraseology of one of your Op-Eds is quite clear: the new “terror” is called “climate stress“, and it will cause a long list of disasters and upheavals if “nations fail to aggressively limit carbon dioxide emissions and develop technologies and institutions” “to cope with a warmer planet.”

(“Terror in the weather forecast” by Thomas Homer-Dixon, IHT April 25, 2007)

And so: just a few years ago the neo-cons pushed for an ill-judged preventative “war on Saddam” to protect us against fantasized Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

And to export the institutions of Democracy.

Nowadays it’s the turn of the neo-warms: recommending a preventative “war on carbon dioxide” to protect us against (future!) climatic changes of just as massive (predicted) destruction potential.

Ominously, this too will mean exporting political institutions.

Don’t we ever learn?

Intelligent Design – Blasphemy?

Religious discussions about the theory of Evolution crop up every once in a while. Now it’s the turn of The Economist to dedicate one Briefing to “Evolution and religion”.

In that article it is reported the well known fact that in certain Christian and Muslim circles there is now support for so-called “Intelligent Design” (ID), “the idea that some features of the natural world can be explained only by the direct intervention of a ingenious creator“.

Frankly, as a Christian and Monotheist myself, I do find ID insulting to the very concept of an Omnipotent God and therefore bordering onto the blasphemous.

Let’s assume some computations mentioned by ID proponents are correct (“it would require about 300 times the age of the universe to by chance form just one protein molecule“). The alternative is to have an Intelligent Being making something as complex as a protein, or as an eye appear.

This God or Gods would continuously interfere with the Universe, adding bits here and there, making eyeballs and noses and whatever else.

Such a notion should be rejected at once. It directly implies that the Being was/is not Intelligent enough to create a universe where proteins, eyes and everything else would indeed come out of a natural mechanism such as Evolution.

It all becomes clearer once we stop separating “natural” from “God-made”. Such a step should be quite easy for a religious type.

Therefore: since God is designing the whole of nature, including all “natural mechanisms”, what prevents Him from making evolution a natural process, using a rather more elegant solution than having to clumsily get any or all parts, big and small, made on purpose?

And think again of the eye: ID proponents say it is “too complex to have evolved on its own“. It’s them putting some kind of limitation to what God could and could not do.

That’s blasphemy: the implication that God would not be able to devise something called “evolution”, and had/has to intervene “personally” in the making up of new species.

Au contraire: the Theory of Evolution is so much more compatible than ID with the whole idea of an Omnipotent God.

The Intelligent Being, if any exists, has created us with a clear instant-by-instant perception of time flowing in a particular direction. This applies presumably to all creatures on Earth. Why not use that constraint then in designing and implementing them all?

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Catholic circles especially in Rome are unwisely toying with the idea of discounting the Theory of Evolution anyway, as it would confine God “to just lighting the blue touch paper for the Big Bang“. Furthermore, if natural selection works with random steps, there it goes the “unique, God-given role in the animal kingdom” for the human species, especially favoured by Pope Benedict XVI.

These arguments should be aired after extremely careful consideration. First of all, as reported by The Economist, there is no point in devaluing the Church by letting it proclaim things that are manifestly false (a warning first made by St. Augustine).

As for the “blue touch paper“: the question is ill-posed. Even if the Universe has been created to follow Natural Laws such as Evolution, there is enough built-in uncertainty, such as in Quantum Physics, to allow any Creator to tinker at His pleasure.

Finally, regarding man’s unique role, I would rather promote more humility.

It makes little sense to try to defend one’s standing when the counterpart is… God!

Reasons To Be Optimist

Early XX century: millions in Europe dream of a bright future of “continuous progress”.

They will confidently march towards their deaths in the fields of the First World War.

Early XXI century: millions in Europe can only imagine a nightmare future of environmental and social catastrophes…

My Correction Printed on the New York Review of Books

I had sent a rather longer letter on March 15 but I appreciate their honesty in recognizing their mistake.

The New York Review of Books
Volume 54, Number 8 · May 10, 2007
Letter – CORRECTIONS By The Editors – In response to Warning on Warming (March 15, 2007)

In Bill McKibben’s “Warning on Warming” [NYR, March 15], the caption to the two photographs of the Upsala Glacier in Patagonia, Argentina, taken in 1928 and 2004 should have said that most of the glacier visible in the 1928 photograph had melted by 2004. Today the glacier still covers over eight hundred square kilometers.

Return to the Moon – a Guessing Game

It was refreshing to see Dwayne A. Day start his “Outpost on a desolate land” article with pragmatic words about calendar slippages in NASA’s return to the moon (on the British Interplanetary Society’s “Spaceflight” magazine, May 2007).

One has just to look at the history of the Space Shuttle and then the International Space Station, compared to the Apollo project, to understand that big space projects without fixed deadlines will cost a lot more than anticipated, and achieve (much later) a lot less.

Some say that’s the way Governments work.

Is there perhaps a case for launching a “Moon Landing” competition, with a prize for whomever will guess the date of the “seventh American landing” (and another for the “first Chinese landing”)?

My entries are the following:

a. Without another Space Race, NASA will finally land again on the Moon on July 11, 2069 (mostly, to avoid feeling ashamed of themselves)

b. With a Space Race with the Chinese, American astronauts will walk on the Moon around July 11, 2029

c. Chinese taikonauts, if things get serious, will reach the Moon around July 2027

Nothing to be enthusiastic about, but what’s the point of deluding ourselves into believing that things will be any faster?

Unless there is some major breakthrough in commercial space activities beyond LEO…