Podcasts - the crowning glory of the Internet

About 25 years ago the grumpy professor Neil Postman wrote an influential book called "Amusing Ourselves to Death", Part of his contention was that people now have lost the capacity to listen, absorb and engage with large serious chunks of information presented verbally. Conditioned by the magic lantern of movies and TV, people's attention spans are shorter and they want everything presented as snappy, fast-cut entertainment.

With the Internet now there is a constant flood of "content" pouring through the pipework - amusement as "information". Smart people are thinking up smart strategies to manage the flows so that they can keep on top of all the "information" - so that they can drink at the fire hydrant without drowning in all the "information" - latest updates about which latest gadget has totally transformed everything again this week, which hot new opinion is a must-read, which video has scored X million hits on YouTube, what's the latest must-think thought.

All that information pulsing through the web has certainly helped me earn my living over the past 15 years but it's also kept me strapped to a keyboard and fixated on a screen for far too much of my life. However the Internet that enslaves also provides liberation. What I love most about the Internet is what I get through it when I'm away from the keyboard and the screens: podcasts.

In a world gone crazy with scanning "content" for key words and images and gobbets of information, rushing breathless past what is now in a frenzy for what's next presented in bite-sized chunks, pandering to our neurotic mania for MORE, FASTER, NOW, good podcasts give us the opportunity to take things at the speed of human speech; they invite us to engage critically with unfolding ideas and arguments, rather than speed-shopping for them; they challenge us to raise our game and become more intelligent rather than merely faster; with no need to provide eye candy, they allow us the pleasure of tuning in to voices - the subtle nuances of pitch, timbre, rhythm and pace.

I've been raving about podcasts for several years now but today's paean was prompted by discovering Chicago Public Radio's wonderful The American Life. If you need your "information" short and snappy, don't bother. If you need jingles and puns and other little tricks to hold your attention, it's not for you. Every week TAL takes around an hour to explore a subject in rich depth, with real-life stories professionally researched and presented by intelligent adults: Unconditional Love, Toxic Assets, Cry Babies and hundreds of others that I look forward to hearing.  It's a gold mine.  It makes me proud to be an intelligent adult.  It makes me appreciate living in 2010, where I can hear a well-crafted piece of radio from another country and several years ago while I do the dishes.

Do you do awesome?

Listening to my 11-year-old and his friend talking about various things - mostly Warhammer - this weekend, I heard plenty of "awesome" and "immense". They also use the High Rising Terminal inflection a lot - making statements sound like a question. My daughter (15) also uses awesome and HRT a lot, but my son (14) doesn't.

As a keen student and observer of language, I noticed a couple of years ago that my wife (mid-40s) uses the High Rising Terminal too. She said she picked it up from her fellow students, who were mostly in their mid-20s. What she didn't pick up was "awesome". In fact she never says it. In fact I don't know any adults who do, apart from a woman in my Twitter feed who hoped we all had AWESOME weekends.

These are just a few examples. My current hypothesis is that mature adults (30+) who want to sound in tune with the times can feel okay using the High Rising Terminal but don't feel so comfortable using "awesome".

Newsletter dinosaurs - pushing in the age of pull

In an era where news is pouring out of every media orifice, where newspapers are struggling, where news is cheap as chips, do you need another newsletter?  Really?

Newsletters as advertising by another name - a variant on advertorials. The sender may have the highest intention to provide high-quality information, but the format and form of delivery is purely promotional. Fair enough, except that it's push in a world that's increasingly moving to pull. It's broadcasting.

From the user/receiver perspective, I see two main modes with regard to information. One is specific need and the other is general curiosity.

If I need information on a particular subject, I'll seek it out when I need it and look for the best sources  available. And sorry folks, whatever area of expertise the newsletter covers, there are none that I need regularly enough to warrant even skimming a newsletter.

For general serendipitous curiosity, I go to high-quality sources that consistently hit the mark - podcasts from the BBC and a few others, a few newspapers online or on apps, social media sites and Twitter.

I do receive "newsletters" - maybe a dozen or more - but 99% of the time I bin them immediately on receipt.

Is the Internet whipping up anger?

There are an awful lot of very angry people out there.  I'm not talking about the oppressed toiling in appalling conditions, who may well be angry.  Rather I mean people with homes and health care and relative financial security.

When I was a lad, the most angry person around was Alf Garnett on TV, the working class bigot who ranted about immigration and left-wingers.  In the 80s it was Ben Elton doing his rantathons on TV. 

Now with the Internet we can tune in to angry people all over the world - the denizens of Fox TV in the States, jihadis from who knows where and ordinary bloggers incensed by whatever - after all there's plenty to be incensed about.

I reckon the Internet has warped the balance of the planet by amplifying two naturally-occurring emotions - lust and anger.  And I'm REALLY ANNOYED ABOUT IT!!!!!! ;)

Social media: Rocket fuel or snake oil?

There's a lot of talk around about whether corporates "get" social media.  The word among those with an opinion (social media fans) is that they don't.  

Maybe part of the problem is the handle "social media" and the way it has become a buzzword. Hypsters and knee-jerk neophiles have proclaimed it the answer to everything, so cynics and knee-jerk neophobes have dismissed it as snake oil.

Social media:  Rocket fuel or snake oil?  Strip away the jargon and the froth, and what have we got? New ways for people to do what people have always done: connect and converse with each other.

I suspect that one reason why social media have not penetrated deeper into the the corporate mainstream is that many, if not most, organisations have very little idea about connecting and conversing in whatever way - online or offline, among themselves or with the outside world.

There's an excellent book by John Seely Brown called The Social Life of Information (my Amazon review here >>>>) where the author describes the difference between process and practice among Xerox technicians. Process is what the manual and the system tells them to do to fix customer problems; practice is how they meet up mid-morning at a cafe and swap stories and tips. Guess which achieves the results....

Connections and conversations are the means whereby problems find their way to solutions, whereby bits of the puzzle find each other, whereby fragments of ideas come together and ideas find people to turn them into reality. Social media are "just" a way for people to connect and converse more widely.

Sally shows smart side of social media

Yesterday evening I had a long chat with Sally Church, a Brit working in the States.

Sally has a highly specialised line of work. She earned her PhD in respiratory medicine and now specialises in helping pharma companies working on cancer and leukemia. This is serious, hard science. Not woo-woo, not fluffy and not self-regarding webby stuff.

She runs a specialist blog on her subject - Pharma Strategy Blog - tweets many times a day, and gets business from both. In fact, as she tells it, her clients know that the best way to get in touch with her is by DM on Twitter.

The great thing is that Sally has found this out by trial and error.  Not only does she have amazing expertise in her own professional field, she's also built up a body of practical knowledge about using social media in a highly specialised, hard-edged field.

The ONLY real issue in business

The ONLY real issue in business is Value. Not values - they're important but different.

Value is quite simply what people feel is spending money on - or spending time, attention and/or energy on.

ALL business issues - design, production, distribution, marketing etc - ultimately come back to this.

What is creating value, what is adding value and what is distributing value are all moot points.

Simple and useful - the genius of Twitter

Twitter is probably the most useful IT idea I've come across in a long time.

What I want is to create and strengthen connections with interesting people, get tips and have conversations that can continue from/into face-to-face or telephone.

Twitter is a very simple idea that works.

Brilliant. Sheer bloody brilliant.

And while I'm at it I very much enjoyed hearing what Clay Shirky had to say on BBC's The Forum podcast.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00b2mh2
I had dismissed him as an Internet raver but he's actually a subtle analyst and a solid thinker.

Why the Internet is like shipping containers

According to some research I did a couple of years ago, in 1956 it cost $5.83 a ton to load loose cargo onto a ship in the United States. By the middle of the noughties, it cost 16 cents.

In 1959 the old style port industry was loading and unloading 0.627 tons of freight per man hour. By 1976, thanks to containers, it was 4,234 tons per man hour.

The lowly, unlovely shipping container created a "revolution" that most of us have never thought about. It started by providing a means of distributing existing products faster and cheaper, and over time if enabled clever people to think up new products, with new business models.

The Internet is having a similar effect. It's giving people an alternative way of distributing some existing products (non-physical products) and enabling businesses to create and distribute new products and develop new business models.

Even FREE can be too costly

Why do people not take up offers for FREE NEWSLETTERS? or FREE SEMINARS? or even FREE INITIAL CONSULTATION?

It's because "free" refers to price, and price is not the same as cost. Price only refers to money. Cost covers money, time, attention (mental effort) and work (physical effort). The characteristic that they all have is they cause a "bad feeling".

An IKEA flatpack is low-price but may end up costing you more than you expected in terms of time, attention and work.

The opposite of cost is value. It's a vague word with many different meanings in many contexts. In this context it really means "good feeling".

When you are deciding whether or not to undertake any action, you always - consciously or unconsciously - do a quick weigh-up of perceived cost versus perceived value. If the cost outweighs the value, you don't do it. If the value outweighs the cost, you do it.

When I see "free newsletter" I think of the time and attention it will take me to read it and the (unlikely) benefit to me of reading it.

So how would you rate these few lines in terms of cost/value?

iPhone 4 antenna problem - my simple solution

You know all the fuss about the dropped signals on the iPhone 4?  It's true..  Not that I've lost any calls.  It's just that the phone routinely shows me a message saying "Network Lost".

That nice Mr Jobs and his people have offered to send me a "bumper" to put round the phone to sort the problem out.  I've ordered one and it's been dispatched, apparently.

In the meantime, I've found a simple, elegant solution.  Don't hold the phone!  Put it on a table if you want to make a call.  I've realised that I normally hold my iPhone in my left hand, leaving my right hand free for fending off overzealous admirers or whatever.  And try as I might I can't hold it in my left hand without "shorting" the antenna band.  In my right hand it works okay as long as I don't use my fingers ;)

All in all, it's a nice piece of kit but how the hell did it ever get released with such a design flaw?

Physical fitness - what's the structure of your motivation?

Most people have an idea about what motivates them to do something; curiosity, boredom, fear, greed are a few common ones.  Not so many people have an idea of the structure of their motivation.  In fact when I first use the phrase with somebody I often get the bewildered response: "Structure?  What do you mean?"  Just this morning I asked the question of my co-coaching partner. It will be the subject of our next call.

Whatever the "what" of what motivates you, for that to result in action through time, it is bound to have a structure.  This applies to any area of life - fitness, work, relationships, hobbies...

For example when I moved to Amsterdam with my wife in 1994, I couldn't cycle to work any more as in London because somebody stole my bike, plus my office was too far away.  However, there was a swimming pool where my wife used to go and do her 40 lengths.  At the time, I was a poor swimmer and I couldn't imagine doing 40 lengths, but I went a couple of times and found I could do 30.  If my wife could do 40, why not me? so I did it a few more times and worked it up to 50 lengths.

That was nice, but I wanted to keep track of how much I was doing, so I devised an Excel spread sheet and set myself a target for the year (300 km).  Gradually I added little refinements such as average distances per week and per session. I increased my length count to over 120. I did this for two years in Amsterdam (95, 96) and continued it when we moved to Malaysia (97, 98), completing 360 km in the last full year.  When we left Malaysia and returned to NL, there was no swimming pool nearby so I stopped, although I do it whenever we're on holiday in a place with a decent pool.

In short, without setting out to do so, I evolved a motivational structure.  The daily driver to get out of bed at 6:30, be in the pool by 7:02 and swim 3km was the spread sheet - the prospect of putting the day's swim into the table and seeing the averages improve and the target distance get a little closer.  I found that a powerful pay-off. Over the longer term, I had the added motivator of my physical shape.  Visually, in the mirror I could see a gradual evolution towards a more athletic V-shaped torso - broader shoulders, trimmer waist.  Kinesthetically, my upper body felt stronger and the arm muscles felt bigger and firmer to the touch.

So I know that to motivate myself for fitness I need a daily routine that's doable, an aspect that can be measured with numbers and tracked through time, and a clear physical pay-off.

Since April I've been developing a new structure that I can fit into my current circumstances.  This involves a clear dietary regime to manage my weight (now down to 80kg from 90kg, target 78kg), dumbells for upper body muscles (they were 5kg, just bought 10kg) and sit-ups for the abs.  I'm still not quite there with the running, although Runkeeper Pro on my iPhone is having the desired effect.

What about you?  What's the structure of your motivation for health and physical fitness?

.

.

.

The NLP conundrum

A couple of years ago I was wanting to deepen my knowledge of NLP and related fields such as hypnotherapy, so I called round a few people whose opinion and integrity I respect. One of them FOTP had established a practice oop north somewhere, having left his job as a qualified nurse in the NHS. I asked him why he had left the "official" health service and gone into an area that many regard as dubious. His reply was interesting.

He had gone into the NHS to help people and he had left it because he found he could help people better outside of it. He gave an example of helping an old lady who had developed agoraphobia, explaining how the NHS would have tackled it with several people over several months, and how he sorted it out within a matter of weeks.

In the right hands, for the right tasks, NLP is very effective. It was put together around 30 years ago by an academic and a gifted student (John Grinder and Richard Bandler) and built out by a number of "first generation NLPers" such as Robert Dilts. It had huge potential, and was quickly taken up by "early adopters", who ranged from diligent explorers of their experience through to get-rich-quick snake-oil merchants.

One on hand, NLP s not a "proper" discipline with a scientifically-validated body of knowledge and practice, and a governing body enforcing standards. If the founders of NLP had gone the strictly academic/establishment route, NLP would have been still-born. It would have had the life squeezed out of it. Part of the power of NLP is that the principles of it enable practitioners to generate their own "techniques".

However, this openness means that there's no regulation and there are no generally-recognised standards of competence in training or in practice. Being an "NLP Master Practitioner" means anything and nothing. It probably means that the person concerned attended a training that imparted certain elements, but is says nothing about the quality of the trainer, the length of time spent training or the competence of the Master Practitioner. Very, very few people who pay for NLP trainings fail to get a certificate at the end.

At most, NLP might have gone the Freud / Jung / Klein route. These forms of analytical psychotherapy aren't recognised as scientific, but they are acknowledged to be "serious" because the lay down a very exclusive and very expensive training and qualification process. The trouble is, in my experience, the people who emerge with the qualification are not necessarily more skilled at providing psychological help than a skilled and dedicated practitioner of NLP. This applies even more to medically-qualified psychiatrists and psychologists.

So here's the conundrum for NLP and other new bodies of knowledge (e.g. Ecademy Digital School). To be useful and timely and generative, it can't go through the process of being endorsed and regulated by official, established bodies. But to become respected and respectable and to give certification that means something, they need to have real minimum standards of knowledge and competence. And if there are real minimum standards, then some people will - MUST - fail to meet them.

The net-net of all this is "caveat emptor". If you want to learn something like NLP, do your homework. Ask around, check which trainers have a good reputation. Ask hard questions. If you sniff snake-oil or get-rich-quick motives, or any lack of integrity, think hard; you will be investing your time and effort, not to mention your money

I bet you are "consuming" different media in different ways now.

I don't much like the notion of "consumption" - so oral and infantile. And consuming media?!  But leaving that aside, it's interesting to see how it's changing.

Last night my mate Rob (b. 1956) said he's on his first week for 20 years without having The Guardian delivered. He found there was too much unread paper piling up. He now reads it on his iPad, but he'll still get the Saturday edition.

Myself, I haven't bought newspapers more than occasionally since the early 1990s, even though I started working life as a news hound. These days I regularly scan the headlines of the Guardian and the New York Times because they have apps for the iPhone and good writing.

I've had paper editions of the Economist and Wired since 1996, and until I got the iPhone I used to read them cover to cover. Now, I find back issues piling up.

I've never been big on TV. For a couple of months in early 2009, when I was feeling at a real low, I watched maybe 2--3 hours in the evening, along with a slug of Jack Daniels. These days, it's maximum one hour in the late evening, usually something I've recorded on the Sky box - Lie to Me, Wallander or a comedy show.

We have DVDs and I occasionally buy new ones, but I never watch them.

We don't have a radio except in the car, but I do now listen to the Today Programme on my iPod radio while I'm doing my physical jerks. For the rest, I get my radio in podcasts, of which I have around 1,000 now.

So looking just at my own media consumption behaviour, the big trends are 1) away from paper to screen, 2) time-shifting of broadcast content and 3) impact of the iPhone as a one-stop media resource for live radio, podcast radio and written content.

Is the Web dead like Wired magazine says?

Very interesting piece in my stalwart Wired Magazine about how use of the Internet is increasingly moving away from browser-based "pull" activities on websites that Google can index, and towards app-based "push" activities.  The Web is not the same as the Internet - it's just one use of the Internet.

This is not a trivial distinction. Over the past few years, one of the most important shifts in the digital world has been the move from the wide-open Web to semiclosed platforms that use the Internet for transport but not the browser for display. It's driven primarily by the rise of the iPhone model of mobile computing, and it's a world Google can't crawl, one where HTML doesn't rule..

As somebody who works through the Internet, rather than with it or in it, I'm not really able to comment on the validity of the analysis, but I find it very interesting. >>>>>>.

Also interesting is this new initative from Ecademy, the social network where I've been active since 2004:  The purpose of the Ecademy Digital School is to train members and prospective members to become an Ecademy Digital Coach (EDC).  >>>>.  Fair play to Thomas and the crew, they've been at it a long time and Thomas is absolutely obsessed with it all. But can they deliver?

The upside of lies and deception

There are a number of shows around at the moment dealing with deception.

There's a Radio 4 show called "The Unbelievable Truth".
A TV panel game called "Would I lie to you?"
There's a BBC TV series about grifters called "The Hustle" which involves the "heroes" creating elaborate long cons in the spirit of Robin Hood.
And there's FoxTV's "Lie to Me", about an organisation run by an expert in lie detection.

All of these are part of a long, long history of stories in which the heroes either succeed in avoiding deception, or succeed in deceiving others.

An ability to deceive others is apparently a corollary of "theory of mind" that most human beings develop in early childhood. It requires the ability to imagine how another person perceives the world. (as does empathy).

Correspondingly, the ability to detect deception is important, not least to avoid being tricked into unwittingly handing over valuable resources.

In an ideal world, some think there would be no deception and everyone would be innocent and guileless and trust would not be an issue. However, that's not the case and never will be, and maybe that's a good thing.

If there were no deception, there would be no magicians, no illusionsts, no painters, no movie-makers, no poets, no writers, no fiction, no works of imagination.... and we would be lulled into dull, unquestioning acceptance that what we perceive without reflecion is The Truth.

How has Apple got away with screwing up our iPhone 3G?

A couple of months ago the world waited with baited breath for the release of the OS4 upgrade for Apple's iPhone operating system.

I didn't rush to upgrade the OS on my 3G, but a day or two later when I synched my phone with iTunes, it installed the upgrade.

Since then the phone has run slower, some of the apps just quit or stop working - even Apples own apps. The phone hangs and generally performs worse than it did when I first got it.

In short, my User Experience has downgraded, not upgraded.

Sure, OS4 works fine in 3GS phones and of course on the latest iPhone, but why the heck did Apple release it for 3G iPhones as well?
Did they test it on 3G iPhones at all?
If they did, didn't they notice how it screwed up performance?
If they did notice it screwed up performance, why did they release it for the 3G iPhone?
And given the widespread problems that 3G iPhone users have reported, why hasn't Apple worked out an OS4 fix to rectify it?

I now have a phone that was delivered to me less than 18 months ago, which works worse than when I first got it entirely because of software made and delivered, in a closed system, by the manufacturer. If that's not an Apple screw-up, what is?

Social Media help friends and family connect more

I'm increasingly convinced that a major benefit of Social Media is in reinforcing connections with people we already know but may not see or speak to as often as we would like.

Thanks to Twitter I have regular connections with my brother-in-law Mike in Sheffield - we never used to interact except when he came to visit.  Also thanks to Twitter and Flickr, I keep up to date with friends in my home town between our monthly photo group meets and occasional chance encounters.

Let's get physical

Just back from two weeks in Greece, bronzed, more toned and barely heavier than I was before, I'm trying hard not to feel smug, but it isn't working.

The first day of the holiday the kids had a windsurfing course and I eavesdropped for a refresher - I tried windsurfing several times in 1982 and thought it should be easy enough to get back into. However, the first day this time was awful - falling off into the sea countless times, struggling back onto the board, hauling the mast and sail up with my arse sticking out and my legs wobbling, falling off again, looking and feeling like a complete dork. After an hour or two I realised why I hadn't done it for a long time and decided to give up. But then, at the end of the session it all came together for a minute or two and I thought maybe I'll stick with it.

So I tried again and ended up going out windsurfing morning and afternoon, for about 3-4 hours a day, graduating to a smaller board (155 litres) and a bigger sail (5.0 sq metres). Gradually I fell off less, needed less hauling back upwind by the rescue boat, and was able to ride the winds at some speed. Mind you, I was constantly overtaken by kids in small sailing boats, because boats go faster than windsurfers. But I stuck with the windsurfing because it's more like riding the waves and the wind bareback - holding on to the boom, you have direct physical contact with the force of the wind. And, as I discovered, it does great things for the upper body muscles and the core strength.

For one such as me who spends most of my working time sitting and writing, there's something deeply refreshing and humanising about getting really physical. I realise I'm very lucky to be able to do it, both financially and from a health perspective - my mum is now in rehab after falling and breaking her femur. So I intend to make the best of it for as long as I can.

In this increasingly IT- and screen-mediated world, there's a real danger of retreating from our physical beings and living far too much in just our heads. In doing so, we lose physical awareness and what I think of as Body Intelligence. When we live fully in our bodies, we are more grounded and benefit from a more rounded understanding of life

When somebody tells you to relax, what's your reaction?

What happens when an angry agitated person is told to relax? Alternatives you may have heard:

"Don't take it so seriously."

"C'mon, lighten up."

"Don't take is so personally."

"Where's your sense of humour?"

From what you've seen or experienced, does the agitated person suddenly snap out of it and relax, lighten up and chuckle?

Smoke, smoke, smoke that cigarette

On Monday I was at an international meeting in London with some youngsters (+/- 30) from various countries. Out of 9 of us, the three German lads and one South African smoked a cigarette every hour or so, out on the balcony.

Since the Monday before, I've been going to visit my mum in hospital in Bath every day - she fell in our kitchen and broke her femur. From the distinctive baccy odour of them I would estimate around half of the medical staff (nurses, orderlies etc, not doctors) are smokers.

Just a couple of weeks earlier my wife was "shadowing" in the same hospital - prepared to start work there in August. Her first stint will be in the ward dealing with respiratory patients, who are in a lot worse shape than many other types. Virtually all of them are smokers.

And thinking a lot further back, my Dad smoked 60 untipped a day all the years I was living at my parent's house. The whole place was shrouded in smoke all the time. He continued smoking after his first heart attack at 60 something, and pretended to stop after his second a few years later. (He used to "go for a walk" and come back reeking of cigarettes and mint). As a kid I swore I would never smoke but I started around age 18-19 and continued to my mid-30s - never more than 4-5 a day usually, but even so....

Of course rates of cigarette smoking have gone down a lot, but my recent experiences show that there are still plenty of people smoking. I could go all high-moral-tone, but I must recognise that I too smoked for 20 years or so despite having had graphic evidence of its ill effects. I wasn't smoking to impress people - I mostly smoked alone at home, towards the end of the day. Even while I was smoking, I could feel it harming me, yet I continued. What the heck was I doing?

And now, despite being pretty optimistic about most things, I wonder what real chances there are of people changing their behaviour for the better (energy use, eating better etc.) when so many of us carry on with an activity that's expensive, socially discouraged and is virtually guaranteed to cause severe health problems?

Human beings don't do facts - we do perceptions

We human beings are not computers or machines. 

Even if we are "no more than" assemblages of chemicals and electrical impulses, our organism is far, far, far more complex and subtle than even the most sophisticated devices created by man.

Treating human beings like machines, or expecting us to process information like computers, is not only wrong, it's wrong-headed - stupid.

"Perception" is not a bug in our human system that prevents us from grasping "reality". Perception is as close as we get to understanding "reality" - it's how we decide which "facts" are relevant, and how we assemble and make sense of those "facts".

Failing to understand the crucial role of perception in human interactions, or ignoring it, is equivalent to thinking that the earth is flat or that the sun goes round the earth.

You are scuppered unless you are hands-on and learning from your experience

In our hyperconnected world, huge amounts of information are available to anybody with a connection. That levels the playing field. It means that a 20-year-old anywhere can muster facts and figures about any field as quickly as most 50-year-olds who have worked in that field all their life.

At any age, in any field of activity, what counts now are two things:

- Personal Experience, which means hands-on, things that you have done yourself NOT the innumerable case histories that are everwhere

- Learning from your Experience which means paying attention to the things you experience, reflecting on them and discussing them. Merely clocking up years doing a particular activity is no guarantee of expertise in it. Another person who has spent much less time doing it, but has learned more from it, will have a clear advantage.

Easy-going as I am, I increasingly find myself listening out for real substance as opposed to bullshit and bluster. I have found real substance in people of all ages, including teens - people who have actually tried things and gained insight from what they've tried.

Apple arguments - what are they really about?

Nobody much seems to argue about ideology any more.  My father-in-law, Billy Bragg and a few other stalwarts still fly the red flag but it's not a discussion that stirs much passion.

Contrast that with the passion for and against Apple.  Every day, in various places - in articles, online forums, in pubs and bars and diverse locations - people get very heated about the pros and cons of Apple.

Being a student of human nature as I am, and believing that arguments are usually about much more than the "content" of what's being argued about, as I believe, you can imagine that I'm wondering what the heck all the Apple arguments are really about.

I can certainly give a pretty full account of why I get worked up on the subject, but before then I would be interested to hear from others what they think.  If possible I would like to hear you perspective on what the Apple arguments are really about, rather than the minutiae of he said/she said, product specs and market share.

Ice cream - the vice for softies

It probably started in my home town, Windsor. A little Neopolitan family ran a cafe with under-the-counter bookmaking and ice cream when the weather was hot, or at Christmas. Just the one flavour, known these days as "fior di latte". Happy days.

Studying in Florence in the 1970s there was the famous Vivoli's to lure me into the ways of indulgence, then working in Rome in the early 80s Giolitti was just round the corner from the office. Since then, I've always made a point of checking out where the best ice cream can be found.

Living in or near Amsterdam 1994-2004 Pisa Ice near the RAI was always worth a detour, Their liquorice ice cream was out of this world. The only downside was they closed for the winter.

In London, just along from the Polish Centre on King Street Hammersmith was a little Iranian restaurant that served gorgeous safran ice cream - barely sweet, but utterly delicious.  Haunting, even.

On holiday with the family in the States in 2007, we found a place in Moab UT that served pretty good ice cream but the portions... even a single scoop ($3.00) was the size of a baby's head. Up in Yellowstone Park, the local ice cream made from Montana milk was very good indeed.

And now the nearest serious temptation is about 6 miles away in Bath - the Real Italian Ice Cream Company is a regular haunt of mine. The texture is excellent but you have to know your flavours. The coffee and chocolate are rich and intense but the mango and the tutti-frutti I had yesterday were a bit non-descript. Just up the road is a little place that does excellent Turkish Delight ice cream plus a few other interesting flavours.

The one I still yearn for is Black Sesame Sesame Seed ice cream I had a small Japanese restaurant in mid-town Manhattan in September 2008.

I could live out the rest of my days without touching wine or beer and not worry too much about it. But ice cream ....

The acid test of conversations

No (wo)man is an island. We are social beings, reliant on each other for practical needs but also for emotional well-being. The more options we have to connect with others, the more we are able to create and maintain the connections we need for our well-being.

Conversation is an essential form of social interaction, except perhaps for the Finns and some teenage boys.* So your approach to conversation is important for your well-being.

Your approach to conversation can leave people wanting more, it can leave them feeling neutral/okay, or it can make them feel like avoiding you.

Whatever your medium of conversation - face to face, Twitter etc. - the acid test is whether other people want to interact with you again, or not. If they don't, you risk a slippery slope to isolation.

After the stress comes .... something else

For the past four years my wife has been studying to become a doctor, most weeks away from home in London. For most of the year before that, she was busy doing courses, exams and interviews. Altogether it's been five pretty stressful years, bearing in mind that the economic crisis swept through everyone's lives in 2008.

Last week she took the last of her finals and we had five days of anxiety waiting for the results. She was sure she had failed, which would have meant losing a job lined up locally and resitting the exams in November.

On Monday the results were published. She passed. There's a graduation ball on Friday and the graduation ceremony in mid-July.

As we've said jokingly, she'll be getting her life back and I'll be getting my wife back. I'm pleased and proud and all that good stuff, yet somehow feeling flat and listless rather than euphoric. Maybe it's just a normal post-stress reaction.

Why England loses against Germany

The short reason is that for Germany, it's just another match towards the objective of winning the World Cup.  For England, it's about getting beyond a sense of national inferiority.  The weight of expectation on the England team against Germany is very heavy. 

Somebody on the radio yesterday was saying that Germans don't regard England as big rivals, so an England match for them doesn't have any special meaning.  He compared it with how the English feel about playing Scotland.  I was in Germany for a couple of days this week and the German colleagues I spoke confirmed this attitude.

FWIW I think the English "thing" with Germany goes way, way back.  In the 19th century Britain regarded Germany with huge affection, as a sort of protege.  Then Germany started getting its act together in industry and technology, and the English couldn't feel so superior any more.  The mood of apprehension was captured in The Riddle of the Sands before WWI

Britain and Germany went nose to demented nose in WWI and the two nations were arguably equal in power.  Twenty years later and Germany was obviously much more powerful.  Britain only escaped total defeat by the width of the Channel and the cunning and bravery of a few key people.  Britain emerged on the winning side ONLY because Nazi Germany had been mad enought to take on the United States and the Soviet Union.  Without the USA and the USSR, Britain was no match for Germany.

I firmly believe that under all the bluster and the racist comments about Germans, the British and in particular the English fear deep down that Germans are fundamentally superior at things that matter to Britain - sport, innovation, business, social justice, you name it.  Everything but entertainment, in fact.  Over the past 60 years Germany has been extraordinarily successful at everything it has attempted.  England hasn't.

The German comedian Henning Wehn put his finger on things very astutely at the Edinburgh Festival a couple of years ago.  To paraphrase, in Britain people go deep into debt to buy 3,000 rotten bricks held together by mouldy wallpaper.  "You flattened all our cities and we rebuilt them properly.  If that had not been the case, we would be living in shitholes like you do."

Even if England wins against Germany, the English will continue to believe, with good reason, that Germany is the boss.

In praise of discrimination

You see the word discrimination and you can barely avoid thinking "racial discrimination". Modern Anglo-Saxon culture has labelled discrimination a bad thing. 

As with so many human skills and behaviours, it all depends on context.

As far as I'm concerned, there is no expertise without discrimination. Expert discrimination is the ability to notice small, critical differences and to use your understanding of those differences constructively. It's about being highly tuned in and constructive.

My wife has a highly-developed sense of colour - she can get upset or rapturous about shades of grey-green that are equally pleasing to me. I notice things about gait, posture and gestures that she doesn't. And we're both very tuned in to accents and language.

It's probably not practical or desirable to be equally discriminating about everything in life. However, if you don't develop or permit discrimination then everything seems the same.

Talking web browsers

I've been a great fan of Firefox for several years - I love the bookmarks bar that enables me to have 50 favicons ready for quick access. I love the Google toolbar that makes online research very quick. Unfortunately Firefox seems to be getting slower.

I like Safari too, although I don't like the way it doesn't show favicons and it doesn't let me do much customisation. It does sync with Xmarks, so I keep the bookmarks up to date but without favicons it's a bit like operating blind. Safari is fast.

I'm growing increasingly keen on Google's Chrome. It's fast and it shows favicons, which makes things quicker. However it spaces the favicons too much, so it only shows half of the 50 or so I have on the bookmarks bar in Firefox. 

In short, to get the functionality I need, I have to use three different browsers, depending on the task

Real results from just a few months of co-coaching

In March I started once-a-week co-coaching with a fellow member of the networking site Ecademy, The system is we have a telephone call once a week for an hour, with half an hour each to focus on whatever are coaching issues for us in the coming week.  I call it co-coaching, but neither of us stick to a strictly coaching framework.

The whole thing started because I asked if anyone was interested in trying it out.  As of today, since starting the co-coaching I've
-  finally managed to get my first website up >>>>>>
- become much clearer about my direction now and next
- held my nerve while working/earning less but preparing more for future activities
- decided the book I want to write - kick off meeting with Mindy Gibbins-Klein is next month.
- lost 9 kg, equivalent to 10% of my body weight - just 3-4 kg to go
- been networking more actively
- got the idea of working towards a research-based PhD and taken steps to make it happen

It may be that a lot of this is a matter of "the ripeness is all" which I call "catching the wave".  However, I can say with confidence that the co-coaching has been an important part of the changes (thank you Mark - you know who you are!).  And I can say with confidence that Ecademy has been an extremely important factor in my personal evolution and in helping me identify a great co-coach - so thank you Ecademy (you know who you are).

Dramatize your competence!!

A couple of years ago my networking group had a presentation from David Thomas, a memory champion who teaches memory techniques.  As part of the morning session, he taught us a technique and gave us a memory exercise, learning the order of ten random imaginary objects in five minutes.  Meanwhile, he set about learning the order of a shuffled deck of 52 cards.

At the end of the five minutes, he recited the order of the cards with 100% accuracy and then as a bonus, recited the first 250 places of Pi.  That last bit was easy for him - he had learned Pi to 22,500 places and was world champion for a while >>>>>.

This morning I was talking to my friend Martin Dewhurt, whose background is in graphic art and top-level photo retouching.  That takes a lot of different skills, including acute awareness of colour.  One of his party pieces is recognizing the Pantone Reference for any object in a room then the corresponding CMYK separation.  If you have any experience of colour technology, you'll know just how impressive this is.  It's a great way for Martin to dramatize his competence - to present some of what he can do in a dramatic, memorable and relevant way.  Apparently,  "crazy as it sounds, we even taught the apprentices to make our cups of tea to specific Pantone colours"

Below is a sample of Pantone colours, just to give you an idea....

Put the iPhone down and read a good magazine

Yesterday I was catching up on my magazine reading.  Since getting an iPhone I've found that it's crept into those odd moments when I used to read a magazine article.

I take no daily papers but I do subscribe to a few magazines: The Economist (since around 1998), Wired US edition (since 1996), Wired UK edition (since last year), Prospect Magazine (since earlier this year) and most recently Frieze magazine (contemporary art and culture).

For me, the Economist is a must-read, just to keep up with things.  It has great covers, and often flags up things I should be aware off, such as Low-Cost cars (the subject of one of my recent case studies for a client).

Prospect is excellent in principle but somehow I find it disappointing - graphically and content-wise, it's much thinner than I hoped.

The magazine that I always find rewarding is Wired.  If you can deal with the wayward graphics, it's just full of very good writing on many interesting subjects.  I like Wired so much that I even subscribed to the UK edition. I'm surprised and delighted to find it is at least as good as the US edition.  Yesterday I read an excellent article on pain, pleasure and habituation - why we should interrupt pleasurable activities and just keep going to complete unpleasant ones.  >>>>>

For me, Wired consistently triggers the urge to share what I've just read with anyone who will listen - surely the measure of interesting content.

Fingers crossed for Frieze magazine.  And fingers crossed I can rein in the iPhone habit.

Apple, other shiny shinies and being human

I'm as seduced by the iPod this stuff as the next man - and woman. And yet...

Over the past 15 months since I got an iPhone, there are now fewer free spaces in my life. The miracle machine is always there with an app to fill that moment.

A few weeks back my iPhone suffered a water incident and had to be replaced, which took a couple of weeks. It was refreshing to have a plain vanilla mobile. I was of course pleased when the replacement iPhone came in.  But it was a useful pause for reflection.

I would say the things that give me most real distinct benefit are
- Weightbot, which has tracked the Harris tally down from 90 kg to today's 81.3 kg and counting
- Runkeeper, an ingenious app and website for tracking runs, cycle trips etc.
- New York Times app - there are full articles and the text is scalable making for excellent reading.
- Radiobox, which allows me to catch snatches of Radio 4 while I'm lifting weights or pottering
- iTunes but specifically the podcasts I listen to.

It's all still relatively new and I hope I'll develop the good sense and discipline to ensure it ONLY benefits my life rather than taking it over.

We really need to bear in mind that however many features and apps there are, we still only have finite attention to allot every day. In anything but a very superficial sense, multitasking may be possible for technology but it's not possible for humans, because we're still on the original OS. The likes of Apple, Nintendo and other technology companies will do their damnedest to grab every moment of our attention they can. It's important - very important - to keep some attention for the things that made us human before technology dangled the promise of making us superhuman.

You never know what conversation will turn up

On the phone with my friend Mark this morning.  He made a chance remark about something I had said a few weeks earlier ... He explained what that had made him think of ...

Then I picked up on a slip of the tongue he made and we tried assuming that his "mistake" was actually a message from his unconscious mind.  We played around with that for a bit and within a few minutes we had cracked a problem that had bugged him for ages.

He's confident that he will be able to enrich his work with a bit of his own magic.  Circle squared, thanks to an open-ended conversation between open-minded guys.

Some conversations energise you, others drain you and worse

I was chatting to my osteopath Anthony Weller about Richer Conversations, the subject of my next book. It really hit a nerve with him. He became very animated as he told me about a woman he knows who completely dominates conversation. He thought there was a connection between that and her husband's high blood pressure - the poor guy is continually having to contain his thoughts. He said that after a couple of hours with the woman he himself feels exhausted. He contrasted it with a friend he sees once a month or so, with whom he regularly has a whole evening of free-wheeling conversation that leaves him feeling energised.


Having benefited from Bioenergetic Analysis in the 80s and early 90s (built on the work of William Reich) I'm particularly interested in how body energy ebbs and flows in relation to what we're doing or thinking.


Conversations aren't just about the words and the subject matter.  They're also about what happens on an energetic level.  Energy can flow freely between and within people, or it can get blocked and thwarted.  You know what it feels like when the other party just goes off on a monologue, or when the other party hijacks ever turn of a conversation to make a point on their pet subject, such as politics.


I suspect Anthony's thought about blood pressure is close to the mark. When people regularly have frustrating conversations with other, that thwarted energy can end up causing health problems.

How do you know when you have learned something?

I was on a hypnosis course in Lancaster, PA, with an assorted bunch of people including a black athlete and sports writer called Len from Louisiana - great guy, very clued in.  He knew he had learned something when he got a "kick inside".  He explained that athletes really have to tune in to their bodies and the signals they give.

Most days I learn a lot about different things - the Internet is full of information and I've got plenty of books and magazines to keep me busy sucking in information.  However, I make a big distinction between learning about and learning how to.  Learning about is nice entertainment, like watching a documentary on TV, and the information may come in handy sooner or later.

However the sort of learning that I particularly seek is the sort of learning that translates into new behaviour, whether it's internal (thinking and feeling) or external.  You might call it "learning how to". 

As one of my favourite trainers and teachers Robert Dilts puts it, "it's just a rumour until it's in the muscle".  Or as I put it, "you don't know until you do."

Chris Bose -

Chris Bose is the head of Internet practice at In Press.  For me his outstanding qualities are a razor-sharp mind, huge curiosity, a sense of fun and willingness to take himself and others out of their comfort zone.  The following comes from a conversation we had in Bristol, UK on May 26th 2010, recorded with his consent for the purpose of this piece.

"Everyone plays to their own rules within the constraints of the system ... constraints are really important.  In a prospect situation, people ask 'what would you do if you had infinite budget?' but that's a ridiculous question because there are always constraints and the best ideas come from constraints and discipline."

"I was challenged by one of my teachers when I was 17.  He said 'you've just given a very precise answer' and I said 'actually I think I've given a very accurate answer, precision is something else' ... so I explained the difference and he said 'yes, you have a very precise mind.' "

SH - You have everything it takes to be a total pain in the arse, but you're not.  How do you manage it?
"Because I make no attempt to be pendantic and I love to explore where the ideas go.  So I hope that I give people the scope to explore their ideas. But  I don't have this conversation with anyone else except you."

SH - So you can be a pain in the arse with other people?

"I can come across like that, yes.  But I've now chosen to use it as one of my filtering rules ... people who still think I'm a pain the arse, I will filter out from future contact."

"I would always be the one to put his hand up and ask awkward questions ... it takes practice, believe me ... I assume very little.  I test everything.  I set up experimental solutions ... I use conversation to test people out."

"My bigger purpose is that I was trained as a scientist, a research chemist.  I want to continue being a scientist ... so I want to organise my business arond the principle of research ... on the Internet the numbers give me the ability to do that."

"You have to have an edge in life ... I believe it's important to hone my defensive skills all the time, even though they may never be called into action.  But that's not the point .. I think it's right to have an edge all the time, but it's not an edge where the intent is to wound someone, verbally or whatever.  That's quite a fine line sometimes - that's why it's called an edge (laughs)."

Flickr vs. Smugmug - why does one generate so many more views than the other?

I share my photos online on two sites.   One seems to generate far more views than the other.

Smugmug was the one I used first, starting in June 2007.  I just used it as a photo gallery and didn't take advantage of any of the community aspects.  I didn't comment on other people's photos, and nobody has commented on any of mine.  My bit of Smugmug is here >>>>>>.

I started using Flickr around a year ago.  It's the site my local photographic group uses, so there's a community aspect to it as well.  We comment on each other's photos.  Since I started using Flickr more, I pretty much stopped uploading photos to my Smugmug account.  My Flickr photostream is here >>>>>>

Now here's the puzzle.  I'm  been active on Flickr and passive on Smugmg.  I know people on Flickr and I know nobody on Smugmug.  YET the site stats show that I get far more views on Smugmug than I do on Flickr. According to the Smugmug stats, to date I had 823 views in May 2010.  Last night I uploaded four photos and on May 30th alone I had 150 views.  Compare this with the Flickr stats where my May stats look around 530 views.  I uploaded seven photos to Flickr in the same session as the Smugmug upload yesterday, and my viewing stats combining yesterday and today to date show 51 views.

My question is this: Why is there the huge disparity in my views between the two sites?  Especially bearing in mind that I'm active on Flickr and not at all on Smugmug.

Challenging your prejudices - country music

About 20 years ago a young French visitor overturned my prejudices about American country music.  I was showing her my multiple TV channels and quickly skipped past CMTV.  "Stop I want to see that one."  So we went back and watched a couple of music videos.  The girl said "these people can really sing" and she was right.  And the lyrics told stories - some mawkish, some touching, some funny, some outrageous.

From then on I was a regular CMTV viewer, until we moved to Amsterdam and I drifted away from country music.  Then one afternoon one of the creative teams were raving about Emmylou Harris.  I had previously heard her and not been much interested, but I bought her album "Wrecking Ball" and then "Red Dirt Girl".  RDG is all her own songs and they are as deep as anything I've ever heard.  Don't just take my word for it.  Check out this clip of "Michaelangelo" and tell me it doesn't reach deep inside.

One subtle but important effect of Twitter

My first-ever website is currently nearing completion and I was discussing the finishing touches with Andrew Eberlin, who is also the chairman of the town Chamber of Commerce and a fellow stalwart of our local photo group.

We discussed integration of Social Media features into the website, which led on to Twitter. The core members of our photo group, plus the odd honorary member, keep up with each other on Twitter between face-to-face meetings.

Andrew described how Twitter has brought him closer to a couple of old friends who leave just a few miles away in Bath. Over the years, they contact each other sporadically, each time finishing off with "we must meet up" - but they rarely did. Then Andrew and his friends started bumping into each other on Twitter, getting familiar with the latest in each others' lives, and started meeting up in person more often. Now they see each other regularly.

What happened?

One of the problems with people we don't know, or people we know but see rarely, is that our lives are out of sync with each other. Or rather, our knowledge of each other's lives is out of sync. So at a first meeting, or first meeting for some time, there's a lot of catching up and trying to find common ground. In NLP terms, we're trying to get into rapport. In IT terms, we're trying to get into sync.

What Twitter does, for those who are patient, is to enable people to stay more or less in sync with each other's lives. Of course it's hard to be profound and deeply meaningful in 140 characters, but it is possible to enhance meaningful connections through regularly interactions on Twitter. I'm not talking theory here, or conjecture - I'm talking about my own experience and the experience of people I know.

Calling all ROI specialists - what's the answer to this one?

Most business conversations sooner or later (usually sooner) talk about ROI.  I've thought about the subject a lot and would like to share the following considerations and finish with a question.

The principle of ROI or Return on Investment is pretty simple.  When you invest resources in something, you have to get a return that amounts to your original investment plus a bit, or a lot.  If your return amounts to less than your investment, you've lost out.  You would have been better off not investing it.

ROI is a basic principle of nature.  Take sustenance.  If an organism such as an monkey or a bird uses up N calories of energy to gather 2xN calories of food, it's ahead of the game.  It will thrive.  It will put on weight, which is handy for lean times such as winter.  If on the other hand it uses up 2xN calories of energy to gather N calories of food, it's in trouble.  A zoologist friend of mine devised a PhD-earning system for working this stuff out precisely.

It's also a basic principle of business.  The simple calculation is:


I've had several experiences of ROI with my own money over the years.

A few years ago I got chatting to an IT guy about my mail access issues.  He said he could sort it out, did me a proposal and I went for it.  It involved acquiring a Dell server (£800) and having him set it up (another £800).  It quickly became apparent to me, in practice, that this was not only a poor solution, it was worse than the original situation.  So I quickly nixed it and returned to the status quo ante.  From that the £800 set-up charges were lost and I eventually donated the server to a local school.

My gain from the investment was zero.  Sure, there was a little learning, and a moment of good feeling from giving the server away.  But against that was the loss of time (hence money) in sorting it out.  So let's be generous and call it zero.  Now, using the ROI calculation, I had gain (zero) minus cost (£1600) = -£1600.  Divide that by the cost (- £1600) and unless I'm much mistaken the ROI was -1.  Somebody may put me straight on the detail, but I think the principle is right.

Contrast that with an Epson GQ 3500 laser printer I bought for £1,600 in 1986 or thereabouts.  My previous printer took hours to print out the translations I was doing, thereby tying up the computer.  The Epson printed in five minutes what the other printer needed four hours to print - literally.  At the time I was probably averaging about £12.50 an hour or £100 a day.  Assuming the laser printer gave me 4 hours extra working time a day - £50 - and assuming I worked 200 days a year, that would be equivalent to a gain of £10,000 a year, all other things being equal.  So the ROI on the laser printer was: Gain (£10,000) minus cost (£1,600) = £8,400 divided by cost (£1600) = 5.25 or 525%.

So far so accountable, right?

Around the time as I bought the laser, I had a £1,500 "retraining allowance" to spend, and I spent it with a guy called Frank Bowyer.  He was a former engineer, businessman, wrestler and I don't know what else.  Quite a character.  He used to come to my place once a week for a couple of hours and we talked.  It was unlike any other conversations I had.  All of my friends heard about these conversations and used to ask what was the latest with Frank.  Some still refer to them, 25 years later.  They were conversations that provided me with more value than I could quantify in any meaningful way - they're still providing value, and in that sense the value has been infinite - literally.

So if I apply the ROI calculation here, I have return (infinite) minus cost (£1500) divided by cost (£1500) = What?  Is it Infinite ROI?

What entrepreneurs and business people don't appreciate

Over the past 30 years, and especially the past 20, we've seen the lionisation of business and entrepreneurs. In no particular order, Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, Bill Gates, Jack Welch, Mark Zuckerberg, Alan Sugar,Sergei Brin and Larry Page are all celebrities recognised and admired by millions. The Apprentice and Dragon's Den are prime time viewing.

Many people aspire to have some of that oomph and to be entrepreneurial in one way or another. It's exciting, it's self-expressive, it's changing fast, it's very now. Sexy. And of course as we have learned to the point of orthodoxy, virtually everything in our society depends on business and entrepreneurs coming up with new products, employing people and keeping the wheels of the economy turning.

Now, with austerity looming and the need to pay down the huge debts the UK (and other countries) have run up, business people and entrepreneurs are looking to their wallets and passports and wondering whether they should move somewhere that's more business-friendly and takes less in tax.

I don't like paying tax any more than anyone else and I don't like waste of tax money of the sort highlighted routinely by the Daily Wail and others. I don't like "big government" that demands and controls increasing proportions of the national pie.

I don't like selfishness either. Among entrepreneurs and business people I see a great lack of appreciation for ordinary people who provide vital public services for pretty poor money - teachers, nurses, servicemen and women, emergency service workers, police, prison officers etc. Every country has them - has to have them - and every country has to pay them. How they are funded is a moot point - the business models that they work by. They have to be paid a living wage, even if they're imported from low-wage countries (ooops, immigration issues).

There seems to be a general assumption that a lot of public service workers are in their job because they haven't got the wit or energy or courage to do something more entrepreneurial: that they're losers and slackers with no get-up-and-go. Somehow we have lost the understanding that public service can be an honourable and admirable calling, a source of great satisfaction and pride and even moral principle.

It's a huge paradox that the people who earn least do jobs we rely on most, and the people who earn most do the most superfluous jobs.

"Like talking with a brochure"

Having a conversation about Richer Conversation with a local professional today who came up with a beaut.

"With a lot of middle managers it's like talking with a brochure.  After a conversation with them I feel exhausted."

Whatever the context, business or private, feeling exhausted or glum afterwards is a sure sign that the conversation wasn't rich.

And then she explained what Art is

"What is art?"  I really don't but I have long felt that I was missing out on something by not even having the vaguest idea.  Sure, I've seen all the paintings in Rome and Florence and Paris and various museums around the place.  I've got a few art books, notably Vermeer, a favourite.  I've got a few books of art photography - Mapplethorpe, Ernst Haas and the like.  But I didn't really know.

So I called my friend Sarah J, who's a mature art student in her first year (second if you count the Foundation Year).  We met up yesterday for a coffee and she had brought along a load of reading materials, including a copy of her autumn term essay comparing Art Photography with Non-Art Photography.  So that's where the conversation started.

It was a treat.  It ranged far and wide in (as I discovered from Sarah) a way that the Surrealists would have liked. Neither of us was embarrassed to use high-fallutin language or struggle with abstractions, and it all felt rooted in experience and passion.  I learned much more than I expected, both from Sarah, from myself and from the conversation.  And even if I can't give a pat answer to the question "what it art?" I have much more of a feeling for what it means.

Male fashion and the vexed question of shirt collars

Men of a certain age don't face many fashion questions beyond "shall I throw those trousers out or lose a few pounds and use them again?"

One that has vexed me of late is: "Why are virtually all shirt collars now of the sort that I don't get on with?"  Namely the spread shape in the image below.



I have tried a few variations on the spread collar and I like none of them.  Button-down, straight or tab are my preferences.  I tried at Lewins a couple of months ago and they were all spreads.  I tried at the Bath M&S on Saturday and out of a huge selection, I reckon that 90% of the shaped collars were variations on the spread.

Maybe I'm just completely out of tune with the sartorial times.  Mind you I did manage to get a shirt that should meet the approval of LaRae Wilkins, who alerted me to the fraught issue of colours.

These days every day feels like Christmas

I'm finding that every day can feel like Christmas as long as I have a good conversation with somebody and I do it in a spirit of openness, curiosity and no ego tripping.  

In practice Christmas isn't everybody's favourite event (certainly not mine) and it's not even relevant to non-Christians. But what I'm talking about is the idealised version - giving and receiving gifts.

Take today. Going into the office I passed the owner of the cafe downstairs. Smart arse that I am, I said "Good day" to her in Polish (she's Polish). Idiot that I am, I actually said goodbye. She laughed and explained.  I laughed and slapped my forehead.  So I got her to write the words for good day (dzień dobry), Then her Guatemalan husband joined in and we had five minutes of lively chatter when we both learned something - about the words but also about each other.

The more I explore conversation, the richer I find it.

On being like Leica - the Richer Conversation analogy

What is Richer Conversation?  I know what I mean and people who have spent time with me know what I mean. But what about everyone else. I have been looking for an analogy to illustrate / communicate the essentials of this premium service. I was fiddling around with Rolex and similar luxury brands, then I realised a better analogy for Richer Conversation is Leica cameras.  Here's why.  Your feedback will be valued and I guarantee to respond.
-----

For those of you who aren't familiar with the brand, Leica is a German brand with over 75 years of heritage, being the favoured camera of photography legends such as Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa. The classic Leica concept, embodied in the M-series, is unlike anything else in photography.

Mechanically they are extremely high quality and last forever, both the cameras and the lenses. This makes them very expensive. The M7 film camera body alone costs around £2,758.00 and the digital M9 costs £4,850.00. A simple 50 mm lens will cost at least £1,000 new - they don't do zooms.

Technically, they don't use the mirror/reflex system you get on an SLR. Rather than looking through the lens, you look through a viewfinder. There's no clunky mechanism flipping the mirror up and down with a judder and a noise. It's quiet, small and discreet.

They don't come loaded with gadgets enabling you to "point and shoot" - they demand some knowledge of photography and they take learning to use. They're not for happy snappers and they're not for photographers who like chunky great bits of kit.

People who use Leicas have a whole different mindset and feeling about taking photos. Every aspect of the Leica (history, design, brand, technology etc.) pushes the user to see things differently, with a heightened sense of awareness.

The essence of the analogy for me is this. Everyone can take photos but when someone uses Leica, they engage more with their photography and get more out of it. Similarly everyone has conversations, but people who embrace Richer Conversation engage more with it and get more out of it.

- How would you boil the Leica analogy down to the essentials, so that it communicates quickly?
- Any other brands that might have a similar dynamic of fundamentally changing the user's relationship with the function the brand serves? I rejected Rolex because it doesn't change the owner's relationship with time. And Apple is too mass market.

------
* No offence to happy snappers nor to "serious" photographers. For the record, I use a Canon SLR and lenses and I don't (yet) have any Leica kit.

Watch out, he's an intellectual !!

Yesterday evening my friend Andrew commented to another friend, half tongue in cheek: "Stuart is a real intellectual". Now I may be wrong, but "intellectual" is rarely used as a neutral handle for somebody in the way we use "tall" or "talkative". Quite often during the past century people labelled as intellectual were villified and even killed.

So over the years I've tended to assume it's a put-down, a short-hand way of saying that someone has their head in the clouds or even up their arse. Then last week, in conversation with somebody else whom I regard as a real business "player" several leagues above mine, he said he was surprised that I wanted to meet up with him because (his words) "you're educated and I'm not".

So maybe "intellectual" is sometimes used from a defensive impulse rather than with offensive intent. Maybe I should just take as a neutral description. Or maybe I should just accept that no description of anybody is ever really neutral.

A week of conversation and still going strong

Over the years I've been on a few extended busienss trips abroad with colleagues and clients, and always enjoyed them.  Always.  Last week I was off to Sicily with a BIG Dutch client, Pim Berkhout, founder and main owner of de Arbodienst..

I say BIG advisedly because Pim is tall and hefty - heftier than he would like to be.  He also has a big voice and a very big personality.  He can be daunting and domineering. 

He likes to do his brainstorming and business in interesting places.  So we met up in Rome airport on Saturday 3rd April, flew on to Catania and spent much of the next eight days in conversation over breakfast, lunch and dinner, as well as between meals.  Mostly the conversations were in English, occasionally in Dutch and sometimes in Italian.  And amazingly, by the end of the week we were still going strong, conversationally.

Our agendas were very open - we were both looking for ideas and inspiration to move our respective businesses and possibly to seek some opportunities for collaboration.  Pim is highly entrepreneurial and I have other skills and interests, so we learned a lot from each other.

At the beginning of the week I wondered how we would fare spending so much time with each other.  Would we run out of things to say?  Would be get bored with each other.  Once again, I learned that it's possible, with the right intent and skills, to spend many hours and many days with someone and still have fresh, rich conversations. 

Men and conversations - is it true?

Conventional thinking says that women are much better at general, open-ended conversation than men are. I can certainly think of a number of men - often the male half of a couple - who are really hard work in conversation. However, I can also think of quite a few men who are a pleasure to talk with, and quite a few women who are hard work.

Conventional thinking says that women try harder in conversation because - either by nature or by conditioning - they are more focused on smoothing things along, on making sure other people are looked after and feel good. It says that men tend to be more "instrumental" in their conversation, talking for a purpose and not talking just for the sake of it; they tend to compete with jokes, quips, digs and facts.

As in so many areas of life, conventional wisdom grossly oversimplifies the situation, but it does contain more than a grain of truth.

Purposeful Conversations vs. Random Conversations

I wrote "vs." in the title but there doesn't need to be a contradiction.

A conversation may start off with a specific purpose such as deciding on an itinerary, but if the parties involved are open to it the conversation can become random and lead to who knows where. I booked a hotel in Taormina at the weekend and having cleared the details, ventured a few random comments and observations which opened the whole thing up. All sorts of information comes up, some of it "contentual" (the director is a former tennis champion) and some of it contextual (Antonella enjoys chatting and has a sense of humour).

Conversely, a conversation may start off random and increasingly focus on a purpose. For example this morning I called Mike for a chat and we ended up talking about how and where I would ideally provide the new service I'm thinking through.

Jumping to conclusions in conversation

In conversation with my friend Philippe, he spoke about a rigorous interviewing process that he uses and trains others to use. The trouble is, he explained, that people supposedly using the process have already made up their mind within a minute of the starting the process and they waste an hour going through the motions, just to arrive at the conclusion they had already reached an hour earlier.

There are times when coming ot a conclusion quickly is vital - for example in A&E admissions in a hospital.

However, there are many occasions and circumstanstances where jumping to conclusions - or paying too much heed to the impulse to jump to conclusions - is counterproductive. Sometimes it's important to open oneself to more information, more deeply, for longer and allow the brain/mind to work on it.

One area where people often try to force things is language learning. From my early years teaching English to foreign students (through the 1970s, on and off) it was so clear to see when students were stopping incoming words in their ears and - metaphorically speaking - trying to force a direct translation out of them, or worse, refusing to believe that the word could exist. What works with foreign languages, and many other things, is to allow information in and to trust the mind/brain to do its work.

All too often we apply "technische afhandeling" (technical processing) as a lazy, self-confirming shortcut.

How long before I succumb to e-books?

Too many CDs and too much convenience from iTunes / iPod have virtually halted my purchasing of physical CDs.  I now buy at least as much music in purely digital form as I do on CD - probably more.

I stopped buying printed newspapers in about 1994, when we moved to Holland.  These days I read a selection online, including on my iPhone - it's perfectly possible to read a long piece that way.  However, I do still get printed copies of the Economist, Wired magazine (US and UK) and Prospect magazine.  I've always taken weeklies and monthlies since I was a kid, and I like having the physical paper handy.

I take a load of photos but most of them exist only in digital form.  A couple of years ago I did take the plunge and have 500 or so printed up, but we look at them less often than the digital versions.  In the next week or so I'll be selecting, processing and sending off a dozen or so photos to make big prints for an exhibition - but they're the exception.

I work entirely paperless.  The only things I ever print out are for the accountants.  For the rest, it's all digital. 

I have bookshelves full of books, many of which I'll probably never get round to reading.  Yet I still can't resist buying titles that catch my eye, even though many will only ever gather dust.  In some respects it would make more sense to get them on an e-reader,  Yet at the moment, that feels like one screen too far.

I'm sure that if I actualy took the plunge and got an e-reader, I would be hooked.  However, looking at the move from this side of the decision I feel sad about it. Books are the last hold-out of analog content in my life.

How do you know?

How do you know something's funny? A good sign is when it makes you laugh. However, I remember watching the Fast Show when it was first on and finding it very funny but not laughing - at least not until later. And funny is probably the easiest to know.

How do you know that you like a food? Obviously, if you enjoy eating it is a pretty good sign. But then why bother acquiring a taste if you don't immediately like it? How do you know it's a taste worth acquiring?

Reflecting on most things we think we know, it seems to me that paradoxically it all comes down not to the rational "knowing", but to the feeling of "knowing".

So how do you kinow whether somebody is good to do business with? How do you know whether you've spent your working day well or badly? How do you know whether your plans are giood or not?

Sooner or later, what we call "knowing" comes down to a feeling. Our evaluation of knowing and in fact of everything else ultimately comes down to how we feel about it.

My favourite model

Yesterday evening I had a long rich conversation with my friend Jeremy, covering (among many other things) models of interaction. In plain language, I mean the roles that are implicit or explicit in interactions between people

We were struggling to find a description of the model that I naturally use. The key elements are:
- Equal partners: no single party owns the high ground or runs the agenda
- Open agenda: exploratory, not instrumental towards achieving a specific improvement or outcome
- Creative: building on each others' inputs
- Unselfish: feeding the conversation, not the ego - no point-scoring
- Authentic: speaking from the heart, honestly

It's not small talk but it's not heavy talk either. It's definitely not coaching or therapy or motivational, although the effect can be any/all of those.

Professional Thinking and Writing

Powered by ScribeFire.

Gun worship, the global religion of our time

When I was a kid it was all cowboys and Indians, and I fashioned Colt 45s out of bits of wood and Lego.  Then it was the Man from Uncle, James Bond, Dirty Harry, then later the ironic gun play in Tarantino films.  Then of course there's "24" and numberless gun-toting films and series on TV.

I can't imagine how many people I've seen get shot in the name of entertainment.  It's normal, par for the course, all in a day's viewing.  From a certain perspective it's not so different from the bread and circuses of Ancient Rome, where the plebs went along to watch gladiators fight and die for their pleasure.  The difference now is that we don't smell the fear and the blood, plus we get close-ups and slow-mo shots of bullets meeting flesh and exiting amid a spray of blood.

My youngest came back from an overnight today, having played an 18-plus rated video game.  "I killed eight in my go, but Joe's record is 27 - that's amazing".  Part of me felt disgusted and part of me thought, don't be stupid, boys will be boys.

It's bad enough living in a global popular culture where gun worship is widespread, casual death by shooting is normal.  I'm just glad I live in a country and a continent where most people don't carry guns and confine their gun worship to screens. 

---

Professional Thinking and Writing

Thinking about the brain

Have you been listening to A History of the World in 100 Objects? It's compelling listening for anyone interested in our species and our world.

It's also so refreshing to have it in purely audio form rather than on TV. As soon as video cameras get involved, they hijack the whole thing and all too often we end up with video cliches. When it's purely audio, it relies on the descriptive powers of the speakers.

Anyway, one fascinating insight is that although human beings have so much DNA in common with primates such as chimps, our brains are asymmetrical whereas other primate brains are symmetrical.

Another is that, according to the programme, fMRI shows the brain areas involved with speech overlap with the areas activated for knapping stones (chipping stones to make tools). The hypothesis from this is that stone knapping and speech co-evolved.

---

Professional Thinking and Writing

Mixing fun and serious in business

A couple of weeks ago I had a message from somebody (not a business contact) commenting on the style of threads on Ecademy, the social business networking site. As you will see, the person doesn't regard Ecademy as a place where serious business is done or discussed, nor indeed where serious business people hang out.

"Now the threads at Ecademy have so many batty cartoons and loud-font signatures (and let's add the Skype icons along with the Twitter icons which trail the colored membership stars, etc.) and the average Ecademy thread looks like a MySpace page where twelve-year-old are attaching cool avatars or catchy quotes by Cicero or by Robbie Williams as they complain, using frowny faced icons, that their parents don't understand them."

I can see the point that this person is making, but on the other hand a lot of serious new businesses (e.g. Google) use whacky graphics and fun stuff. I know that that Smugmug, a 10-year-old photo sharing site that's been self-funded and profitable all along, does some pretty whacky stuff back at base.

I've no doubt that there are plenty of buttoned-down businesses people who would fire everybody on Ecademy in a heart-beat for not being serious. There are some very hard-nosed, glum people around. A very senior contact of mine recently told me about attending a board meeting of his company in the USA where the CEO was ranting about health care and commies.

However, I think that there are plenty of successful young companies proving that it's perfectly possible and even desirable to be effective in business while keeping a light touch and a sense of play.

Subtle seems to be the hardest word

We are constantly buffeted by hyped up blasts of "awesome", "brilliant", "revolutionary", "transformational", "sensational", "utterly", "massive".

Trillion is the new billion, billion is the new million, million is yawn.

With everybody is shouting louder, harder, more vividly, more outrageously, the signal-to-noise ratio degrades. There's so much noise that we all turn up our filters, which makes it harder to pick up the signals.

All of this works against the development of subtle skills, which are essentially the ability to create and to discern fine critical distinctions. It also works against the appreciation of the fine grain of experience, the details of life. Great professionals and people who achieve great things invariably have a great capacity for subtlety.

Since I took a tumble on the ski slopes in late December, I've been getting a lot of nagging pain from the rotator cuff of my right shoulder.

It's okay during the day, mostly, and I think it's getting better, gradually. But it keeps waking me up at night, which means I don't often get a decent night's sleep. So imagine my delight at having woken only once, briefly, last night, and sleeping through till 7:30. My SleepCycle app in the iPhone even tracked the night for me:


Sleeping well is such a blessing. Sometimes, after a particularly good sleep, the word that springs to mind is "delicious". My heart goes out to those unfortunates who don't manage to get good sleep, for whatever reason.