I’ve always thought that Peter Drucker is the only writer one could legitimately call a “management guru” (though Charles Handy runs him close). So it’s nice to come on this essay in the current edition of the Economist. Excerpt:

The world’s great business schools have replaced Oxbridge as the nurseries of the global elite. The management-consulting industry will earn revenues of $300 billion this year. Management books regularly top the bestseller lists. Management gurus can command $60,000 a speech.

Yet the practitioners of this great industry continue to suffer from a severe case of status anxiety. This is partly because the management business has always been prey to fads and fraudsters. But it is also because the respectable end of the business seems to lack what Yorkshire folk call “bottom”. Consultants and business-school professors are forever discovering great ideas, like re-engineering, that turn to dust, and wonderful companies, like Enron, that burst into flames.

Peter Drucker is the perfect antidote to such anxiety. He was a genuine intellectual who, during his early years, rubbed shoulders with the likes of Ludwig Wittgenstein, John Maynard Keynes and Joseph Schumpeter. He illustrated his arguments with examples from medieval history or 18th-century English literature. He remained at the top of his game for more than 60 years, advising generations of bosses and avoiding being ensnared by fashion. He constantly tried to relate the day-to-day challenges of business to huge social and economic trends such as the rise of “knowledge workers” and the resurgence of Asia.

But Drucker was more than just an antidote to status anxiety. He was also an apostle for management. He argued that management is one of the most important engines of human progress: “the organ that converts a mob into an organisation and human effort into performance”.

From The Onion.

LOS ANGELES—As the White House considers sweeping strategic shifts in the war in Afghanistan, heroin addicts across the nation called on President Obama Monday to stick with the current U.S. policy, which has flooded the world market with low-price narcotics. “There’s no need to change nothing, Joe Biden,” said addict Reginald ‘Bones’ Dillow, who, when conscious, is an outspoken proponent of the U.S. military strategy that has resulted in a nearly 40-fold increase in Afghan opium production since the end of Taliban rule in 2001. “Everything is so cheap—it’s all totally fine like it is, right? Over there, I mean. Why would you want to…do the…[garbled].” Obama is reportedly looking into economic incentives that would both persuade poor Afghans to cease opium cultivation and benefit chemically dependent Americans, the most promising of which involves constructing facilities in the war-torn country for the manufacture of methadone.

From David Isenberg’s classic essay — “The Rise of the Stupid Network”…

Former Shell Group Planning Head, Arie deGeus, in his master work, The Living Company (Harvard, Boston, 1997), examined thousands of companies to try to discover what it takes to adapt to changing conditions. He found that the life expectancy of the average company was only 40 years – this means that telephone company culture is in advanced old age. De Geus also studied 27 companies that had been able to survive over 100 years. He concluded that managing for longevity – to maximize the chances that a company will adapt to changes in the business climate – is very different than managing for profit. For example, in the former, employees are part of a larger, cohesive whole, a work community. In the latter, employees are ‘resources’ to be deployed or downsized as business dictates.

This is interesting in the context of the Google Book Agreement, the responsibilities of academic libraries in the area of digital preservation and curation and the Arcadia Project. When people say to me (about digitisation) “Why not let Google [rather than, say, the University Library] do it?” I ask them to name commercial companies that have been around for 800 years.

If, like me, you are puzzled about why apparently sensible people are seduced by the glib half-truths peddled by Levitt and Dubner in Freakonomics and, now, Superfreakonomics then a quick read of Elizabeth Kolbert’s New Yorker review will serve as a useful antidote.

In their chapter on climate change, the two Chicago chancers make great play with Victorian predictions about how our major cities would be buried in horseshit. You know the stuff: New York had 150,000 horses in 1880, each of them producing 22 lbs of ordure a day; people predicted that by 1930 horseshit in the city would be three stories high. Same story for London, etc. etc. But technology, in the form of electric power and the internal combustion engine came to our rescue. So — they cheerily maintain – the same thing will happen with climate change.

Levitt and Dubner maintain, in their breezy knowall style, that the global warming threat has been exaggerated and that there is uncertainty about how exactly the earth will respond to rising levels of carbon dioxide. And, just as with horse manure, solutions are bound to present themselves. “Technological fixes are often far simpler, and therefore cheaper, than the doomsayers could have imagined”.

Although they clearly know little about technology, the two lads are keen advocates of it. Well, certain kinds of technology anyway. They have no time for boring old stuff like wind turbines, solar cells, biofuels which are are all, in their view, more trouble than they’re worth because they’re aimed at reducing CO2 emissions, which is “the wrong goal”. Cutting back is difficult and annoying. Who really wants to use less oil? What we really need, they think, is ways of “re-engineering” the planet.

Er, how, exactly? Well, how about a huge fleet of fibreglass ships equipped with machines that would increase cloud cover over the oceans? Or a vast network of tubes for sucking cold water from the depths of the ocean? (I am not making this up.) Best of all, they say, why not mimic the climactic effect of volcanic eruptions? All that is needed is a way of pumping vast quantities of sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere. This could be done by sending up an 18-mile-long hose. “For anyone who loves cheap and simple solutions, things don’t get much better”.

Eh? In her review, Elizabeth Kolbert refers to Raymond Pierrehumbert’s wonderful ‘open letter’ to Levitt that was published in the RealClimate blog. This says, in part:

By now there have been many detailed dissections of everything that is wrong with the treatment of climate in Superfreakonomics , but what has been lost amidst all that extensive discussion is how really simple it would have been to get this stuff right. The problem wasn’t necessarily that you talked to the wrong experts or talked to too few of them. The problem was that you failed to do the most elementary thinking needed to see if what they were saying (or what you thought they were saying) in fact made any sense. If you were stupid, it wouldn’t be so bad to have messed up such elementary reasoning, but I don’t by any means think you are stupid. That makes the failure to do the thinking all the more disappointing. I will take Nathan Myhrvold’s claim about solar cells, which you quoted prominently in your book, as an example.

Pierrehumbert then does a scarifying dissection of Myhrvold’s nutty arithmetic, which is interesting not just because it shows how a supposedly-clever ex-Microsoft guru can make a complete fool of himself, but also because it shows how Levitt — who, after all, makes the claim that his statistical ingenuity makes him more insightful than the rest of us — can’t do arithmetic either.

Pierrehumbert, like Levitt, holds a prestigious Chair in the University of Chicago, so connoisseurs of academic dialogue will enjoy this paragraph in the prefatory section of his ‘open letter’:

I am addressing this to you rather than your journalist-coauthor because one has become all too accustomed to tendentious screeds from media personalities (think Glenn Beck) with a reckless disregard for the truth. However, if it has come to pass that we can’t expect the William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor (and Clark Medalist to boot) at a top-rated department of a respected university to think clearly and honestly with numbers, we are indeed in a sad way.

Amen to that. There is really only one good term for describing much of the Levitt/Dubner oeuvre: bullshit. What’s amazing — and depressing — is how many people seem to fall for it (at least if the sales figures for their books are anything to go by). What they remind me of most is those pop psychologists who make a living from giving glib keynote presentations about optical illusions to business conferences.

Look what’s just appeared in Cambridge — ye olde sweetbread shoppe, complete with glass jars full of bulls eyes etc. They serve sweets in brown paper bags, just as in William Brown’s day. Before that it was a cigar shop, and before that a gun dealer. Wonder what it’ll be next.

… that a litre of air contains 100,000 billion billion protons?

Neither did I. Just thought you’d like to know this interesting but useless fact.

We are, as George Steiner used to say, “language animals”. Noam Chomsky argued that we are born with, somehow, a natural capacity for language. Now comes some indications of the genetic mechanisms that could be responsible for our great gift.

The first concrete evidence of a genetic link to the evolution of language in humans was published today in the journal Nature. Researchers led by UCLA neurogeneticist Daniel Geschwind have shown that two small differences between the human and chimpanzee versions of a protein called FOXP2 result in significant differences in the behavior of dozens of genes in human neurons.

FOXP2 is a protein known as a transcription factor; its role is to turn other genes off or on. Geschwind and his collaborators deleted the native gene for FOXP2 from a lab-grown line of human neurons. They then inserted either the gene for human or chimp FOXP2 into the cells and screened the cells to see which genes were being expressed, or actively producing proteins. The researchers identified dozens of genes that were expressed at either higher or lower levels depending on whether the cells were making human or chimp FOXP2. They verified these findings by examining gene expression patterns in post-mortem brain tissue from both chimps and humans who died of natural causes…

Excellent (and somewhat depressing) Guardian piece by Stuart Jeffries on what happened to Waterstone’s.

Waterstone's has embraced capitalism’s logic firmly. Even in this Gower Street branch, with its five miles of bookshelves at the heart of London’s university quarter and in an area denser with literary heritage than perhaps any in the world, discounted piles of Leona Lewis biographies and Frankie Boyle’s My Shit Life So Far sit on the tables with the latest JM Coetzee. This lunchtime, the three-for-two tables are ringed by shoppers clutching two books and wondering if they can find a freebie worth reading. Here on the ground floor, the discounting of book prices is so ferocious that if you leave having paid the RRP you feel a right mug.

“They simply treat books as a commodity,” says Nicholas Spice, publisher of the London Review of Books, and one of the chain’s sternest critics. “There’s no sentiment to it. If it’s celebrity biographies that are going to sell, then that’s what they’ll focus on. They’re not looking at it from a cultural perspective.”

What does he expect? It’s a public company, driven by the need to maximise “shareholder value”.

Thanks to Lorcan Dempsey for the link.

This is my piece of the Berlin Wall. It normally sits on the windowsill of my study. I would like to have been in Berlin yesterday, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the crumbling of the wall, but had carelessly allowed my passport to expire and was in London getting a new one. Still…

One thing really pleased me, though — that Mikhail Gorbachev was there, and was properly honoured by Angela Merkel. If the story of the disintegration of the original ‘Evil Empire’ has a single hero, then it’s Gorby. “His achievement”, commented the Economist last week,

“was not in making great intellectual discoveries, but in spelling out publicly what people had said and thought in their Moscow kitchens for years: that people in the West lived better than in the Soviet Union, that the Soviet economy was inadequate and that ‘we can’t go on living like this any more.’ This was common sense. Saying it openly, however, was a breakthrough.”

This triggers a rueful thought: Gorbachev was a lot more perceptive than yours truly. In 1977-78 I was a Research Fellow at a Dutch university. One of my fellow academic visitors was a Soviet scientist. He was a Vice-President of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, which meant that in those days he was a Very Big Cheese indeed. (Once, with a single telephone call, he had several seats cleared from an overbooked Aeroflot flight to make space for a friend of mine who was visiting Georgia.) Before he returned to Moscow, he and I had a coffee together. I asked him whether there was anything he would miss from his Dutch sojourn when he returned home. “Oh yes”, he said, “the photocopier”.

“Eh?” I replied, baffled.

He went on to explain that he regularly spent two days a week in periodical libraries back home copying out extracts from scientific papers in longhand. “You see”, he went on, “in my country photocopiers are regarded as devices that need to be strictly controlled. They can be publishing machines for samizdat.”

At that point I ought to have twigged that the Soviet system was doomed. If it couldn’t handle routine information technology like photocopying (and FAX) then it would be unable to modernise. So it was only a matter of time before it crumbled.

As I say, I ought to have spotted that. But it was only years later that the significance of the conversation really dawned on me. Gorbachev’s genius was that he saw the problem, understood what it meant — and had the courage to state the obvious. That, and his refusal to use force to save Honecker in East Germany, were the critical factors in the remaking of European history that took place twenty years ago. But he’s been effectively written out of the story. Which, I suppose, was predictable. History, after all, is usually written by the victors.