March 2016

There has been some scaremongering going on that involves suggesting that reading and writing are dying out, in their present form at least. I’m not so sure that I would go that far, but things are certainly changing. Let’s start with reading. The traditional idea was that much learning was done by reading and subsequently applying the knowledge gained to situations you encounter. The more reading you did, the better equipped you were to deal, in an intelligent, informed way, with the challenges life threw up for you, whether at work or in your private life. However, a very clear pattern that I have noticed is that many people now are not reading to anywhere near the extent they used…

We are well aware, of course, that if something doesn’t work, we should stop doing it – although that knowledge doesn’t necessarily prevent quite a few people from pressing on regardless with tactics that just don’t deliver the required results. Part of the problems is the power of habit (particularly when such habits have become ingrained in the culture and become part of the expected norms of the workplace concerned. So often people get into an established way of working that they feel comfortable with and stick with it, whether or not it actually works. Much of the time they don’t even know whether or not it is working. So embedded are they in this standardised way of working that…

I’ve never given any credence to the idea that you ‘make your own luck’, as if chance in life can be ruled out in some way. But there is a very real sense in which we can affect the luck we have. We can’t stop chance occurrences from happening, but there is much we can do about how such matters affect us. The Ancient Greeks spoke of the constant tension in life between Cosmos (order) and Chaos (disorder). Many things happen along straightforward lines. They are regular, predictable and orderly – natural processes, for example. But that is only half the story. There are also things that happen at random, in unpredictable, disorderly ways. For a long time there was…