I’ve always been amused by the term “management science” which seems to me as absurd as the term “yoga science”. This hasn’t stopped universities and their business schools using the term, though (see this Google search result for UK universities). I’ve been similarly amused by the big-selling business books that one finds in airport bookstalls — so amused, in fact, that I once proposed that people should be able to trade air-miles for an MBA degree. So it was refreshing to find this admirably acerbic post by Freek Vermeulen in – guess where? – the Harvard Business Review!

Management is not an exact science, they say. And I guess most things that involve the study of human behavior cannot be. But I sometimes wonder if that is the reason — or the excuse — that the business sections at airport bookshops are so full of nonsense.

Quite often these books are written with panache. And the authors — aspiring “management thinkers” and “gurus” (never scientists) — have an excellent sense of the pulse of the business public. They are neither crooks nor charlatans; they write what they believe. But that doesn’t make their beliefs right. People can believe vigorously in voodooism, homeopathy, and creationism.

A common formula to create a best-selling business book is to start with a list of eye-catching companies that have been outperforming their peers for years. This has the added advantage of creating an aura of objectivity because the list is constructed using “objective, quantitative data.” Subsequently, the management thinker takes the list of superior companies and examines (usually in a rather less objective way) what these companies have in common. Surely — is the assumption and foregone conclusion — what these companies have in common must be a good thing, so let’s write a book about that and become rich.

In Search of Excellence and Built to Last, to name a few classic examples, followed that formula — including the getting rich bit. One piece of advice to come out of such tomes, for instance, has been to create a strong, coherent organizational culture, like most of high-performing firms studied. However, we now know from academic research that a strong culture is often the result of a period of high performance, rather than its cause. In fact, a very coherent culture can even be a precursor of what is called a competency trap, where firms get stuck in their old beliefs and ways of doing things. Not coincidentally, the list of superior companies frequently starts unravelling when the book is still at the printer’s.

Right on! Worth reading in full.

I’m writing something about online anonymity and came across this intriguing talk by the founder of 4Chan.

“The reason there are conspiracy theories”, runs an old adage, “is because sometimes people conspire”. They do, which is one reason why the sneering condescension with which people talk about conspiracy theories is, well, unwise. It may make statistical sense (because the majority of conspiracy theories are unfounded), but it’s not good epistemology, because sometimes conspiracy theories are well-founded.

The critical difference is between theories we believe to be well-founded and those we believe to be unfounded or mistaken. To take just one obvious example, the official US explanation of the 9/11 attacks is, in a literal sense, a conspiracy theory: it says that a certain group of Al-Qaeda operatives conspired to launch a daring attack on the United States, an attack that could have been foiled if key government agencies had been more perceptive and acted more decisively. My guess is that most people prefer this explanation to the alternative conspiracy theories for various reasons — the scale of the investigation, the membership of the Presidential Commission, etc. But in the end it comes down to preferring one theory over another.

An example is a conspiracy theory that turned out to be correct was the theory that the British, French and Israeli governments had colluded to invade Egypt in order to overthrow Colonel Nasser and seize back control of the Suez Canal (which Nasser had nationalised).

And this week, another conspiracy theory focussed on the Middle East has turned out to be well-founded. Malcolm Byrne, the director of research at the US National Security Archive has confirmed that the August 1953 coup that overthrew Mohammad Mossadegh, Iran’s populist prime minister, and reinstated the Shah of Persia — an obnoxious puppet of the US and the UK who was to remain in power for another twenty-six years, before fleeing the country in January 1979.

As John Cassidy reported in a recent issue of the New Yorker, “Six decades to the day since a pro-Shah mob, led by Iranian agents recruited by the U.S. and the British, marched on Mossadegh’s residence, Byrne published extracts from internal C.I.A. documents that, for the first time, explicitly acknowledge how the agency masterminded the change of government in Tehran”.

Theories about the C.I.A.’s involvement in the coup (which served as a template for subsequent clandestine operations in Guatemala, Cuba, and other countries), have been around for decades, and were often ridiculed by establishment figures. But an internal C.I.A. account of the coup, which was written in the nineteen-seventies and kept secret until Byrne obtained it, now confirms that the conspiracy theorists were right all along. “The military coup that overthrew Mosadeq and his National Front cabinet”, the report states, “was carried out under CIA direction as an act of U.S. foreign policy, conceived and approved at the highest levels of government”.

The moral? The fact that a particular explanation of an event or a phenomenon is a conspiracy theory doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s wrong. It may turn out to be the best explanation in the long run.

I’ve just learned that Russell Twisk, an old friend and my first editor, has died. He’d had a stroke a while back, and was struggling, so maybe his death came as a merciful release.

I have nothing but fond memories of him. I knew him first when he became Editor of The Listener, a sadly-defunct weekly owned and published by the BBC, on which I was a fiction reviewer and, later, its TV Critic. (Following in the footsteps of more eminent writers like Raymond Williams and Clive James, I might add.)

Russell was an unexpected choice for Editor, possibly because some people suspected that he hadn’t been the BBC’s first choice for the post. At any rate, it was claimed that the supposed favourite, Richard Gott, had been rejected at the last minute because MI5 complained to the BBC Governors that Gott was, er, very left-wing and therefore not the kind of chap one wanted running a major weekly magazine. I have no idea whether this was true, but the Fleet Street crowd believed it and so Russell’s appointment was viewed by them with a degree of patronising disdain.

If he was dismayed or irritated by this he never showed it. And in fact it may have played to his advantage, because he came to the Editorship with low external expectations. In person he was astonishingly modest and understated. But he turned out to be a brilliant editor, possibly because — unlike many editors — he did not believe that he could write better than any of the half-wits he employed (though actually he was a rather good writer, as he showed during his time as the Radio Critic of the Observer). He saw his role as part-conductor and part-impresario, and he was terrific at coaxing the best out of his contributors.

I loved his company. He and I shared an interest in slow horses, and went to many a race meeting together — at which, almost without exception, we lost money and drank champagne to console ourselves. When he eventually retired, he moved to Petersfield in West Sussex, a location he extolled on account of its proximity to Goodwood. I left the Listener to become the Observer‘s TV Critic in 1987, and Russell was headhunted to become Editor-in-Chief of the Reader’s Digest, then still in its heyday. As a grandee of the magazine publishing world (the Digest had a huge circulation then) he often used to invite me to the monthly dinners of the Magazine Publishers Association in Claridges or the Savoy (where I once asked a very rude question of the then US Ambassador). Being his guest gave me a fascinating insight into the world of fashion magazines and the glossy end of the print media.

Apart from his generosity, what I remember most about Russell is his wry, understated humour. Once, when we were standing in Claridges drinking champagne and watching the great and the good of the magazine business roll up for lunch, he suddenly leaned over and whispered into my ear. “This is weird”, he said. “Chaps are beginning to take their own wives to lunch.”

May he rest in peace. There’s a memorial service for him on September 10. And the National Portrait gallery has a lovely portrait of him by Michael Bennett.

While making breakfast this morning I listened to the latest episode of Nigel Warburton’s and David Edmond’s wonderful Philosophy Bites podcast — a discussion of Montaigne with Sarah Bakewell, whose lovely book on the essayist I have read and enjoyed. Like most all of the Philosophy Bites podcasts, this one was thought-provoking and accessible (and I heartily recommend it), but the one thing I missed was any discussion of the similarity between Montaigne’s essays and the writing of good bloggers.

This comparison is not an original idea btw — I got it originally from Andrew Sullivan when I was working on my most recent book. But, as is the case with the Web, Andrew probably got it from Rob Goodman’s beautiful essay on the “Tyranny of Timeliness”, which says, in part:

As these digressions through literature, science, history, anecdote, and memory pile up, we sense that we are dealing not with a narrative, but with a network: no fact is an island; every point is linked to every other point in Montaigne’s mind by an endless array of invisible threads.

Of course, that’s how we all think. But it is not how we all write. Montaigne was unique in finding a written expression for the way conversations evolve organically, the way thought has a shadowy logic of its own; it’s why his essays are such a different animal from the essays we’re assigned in school, so different that they shouldn’t even bear the same name, and why we often feel more at home in them. He did it by being studiedly haphazard. And his achievement matches that of his contemporary, Shakespeare, who took years of experimentation to make his soliloquies sound less like declaimed speeches and more like overheard thought.

A Montaigne essay, like a Shakespeare soliloquy, gives us the impression that we are in the presence not of a disembodied, opinion-spouting voice, but of a real person. Long after those essays lost their relevance, long after the second-hand reports from the Americas and meditations on 16th-century French politics ceased to be news, they have maintained their appeal because they are a personality embodied. And the foremost trait of that personality is freedom: freedom to take up and turn over absolutely any subject in human experience, on any prompting or none; to follow any tangent simply because it catches his eye; to begin and end a continent apart, or simply to trail off; to know for the simple sake of knowing.

In Montaigne’s day, that freedom was the privilege of an aristocrat. Today, unless we trade it away for a mess of relevance, it’s the birthright of anyone with a high school education and an Internet connection.

My colleague Martin Weller also picked up on the Sullivan post and compiled this thoughtful list on what Montaigne means to him.

For me Montaigne shows the way for good bloggers through the following practices:

Honesty – you really can’t blog if you’ve got a hidden agenda. People have too much choice and so what you are after is some form of connection and this comes from people having good ideas, but also from connecting to them as an individual.

Openness – as Sullivan points out in the quote above, one of the endearing qualities of Montaigne was his willingness to think out in the open. This is what bloggers do well, they put forward ideas, take criticism and comments, and develop those ideas partly in conjunction with their readers. They don’t work quietly for three years and then release a finished masterpiece (this is a good way of working for some writing, maybe novels, but not for blogs).

Relaxed style – Montaigne really developed that chatty, informal style which is a lot harder than he makes it look. This is definitely the style that works best in blogs, because, to reiterate the point, part of what makes a good blog is a connection to the author.

An element of the personal – Montaigne’s essays are famously rambling and rarely connected to the title. This approach doesn’t always work in blogs, which tend to be shorter posts focused on a particular point, but what does carry over is the way he brought in personal elements to back up and reinforce wider points, which a good blogger does without making it a boring shopping list.

Reflective and questioning – good bloggers (and when I say a good blogger, I probably mean ‘bloggers I like reading’) seem to me to adopt Montaigne’s reflective approach, questioning themselves, and others. One of the delights of blogging is that it has no commercial masters to please and so bloggers tend to dig around a story, analyse it in detail and question every aspect of it (unlike many journalists who accept the PR from a company to fill space).

Playfulness – I like bloggers who toy with ideas, mess around with media and inject some playfulness into their posts. Blogs liberate us from the considerations of many formal publications and I like people who embrace this.

Owning a vineyard – oh, okay that one doesn’t apply.

In a much earlier post, Andrew Sullivan had a nice meditation on the political significance of blogging (something that would have been entirely alien to Montaigne, I suppose, but which is relevant to any consideration of how blogging affects the public sphere).

Michael Oakeshott’s conservatism owes a huge amount to Montaigne (and Augustine), which is why one of Oakeshott’s central metaphors is exactly conversation. He believed that such a metaphor captures the dramatic, undetermined, spontaneous and organic association of people in free societies. And such an open-ended conversation is, of course, the exact opposite of fundamentalism, which, in its extreme forms, demands no interaction, merely submission to a sacred, pre-ordained text. That’s why blogging is a little retrovirus called freedom, unleashed into the wider world of media to replicate endlessly. And why the blogosphere’s very existence and potential power is one of freedom’s most potent allies in our generation’s war against fundamentalism. Churchill once spoke of sending the English language into battle. He saw it as a great weapon against tyranny. It still is – in print, but just as powerfully, in pixels.

The point of all this is not to reinforce the trope about there being nothing new under the sun, but to counter the hubristic claims about everything digital being new. Of course the technology enables things that were inconceivable up to now, but it also facilitates and sometimes turbo-charges things that have been done for millennia. Like writing and thinking. And conversation.

LATER: Just realised that Sarah Bakewell has written a lovely blog post about all of this. It concludes thus:

These days, the Montaignean willingness to follow thoughts where they lead, and to look for communication and reflections between people, emerges in Anglophone writers from Joan Didion to Jonathan Franzen, from Annie Dillard to David Sedaris. And it flourishes most of all online, where writers reflect on their experience with more brio and experimentalism than ever before.

Bloggers might be surprised to hear that they are keeping alive a tradition created more than four centuries ago. Montaigne, in turn, might not have expected to be remembered so long, least of all in the English language—yet he always believed that such understanding between remote eras and cultures was possible. “Each man bears the entire form of the human condition,” he said. We are united in the very fact of our diversity, and “this great world is the mirror in which we must look at ourselves to recognize ourselves from the proper angle.” His book is such a world, and when we look into it there is no end to the strangeness and familiarity we might see.

Sigh. Maybe the heading for this post ought to have been “Thinking aloud”.

One of the (many) pleasures of holidaying in France is having the time to read the International Herald Tribune from cover to cover every day. (I try to look at it most days when I’m back home, but generally wind up just scanning the front page and the Op-Ed pages inside. In France, we buy it every day and savour it over breakfast.)

Le Trib (as some newsagents call it here) is an exceedingly good journalistic product. It uses its front page essentially as a content-bill for almost everything inside — which means that ever front-page snippet ends with a forward reference. So this morning’s piece headlined “Airlines Are Spending Billions in an Arms Race for Leg Room” comes to a temporary halt with “SEATS, PAGE 10” (where I learn that Business Class aircraft seats can cost over $250,000 each to make and install).

Editorially, the Trib makes a pretty good stab at bridging the cultural chasm that yawns between Europe and the US. Its coverage of European countries (especially France and Germany), though necessarily selective, is pretty informative. It’s good on cultural stuff. Yesterday’s paper, for example, had a terrific review of the latest Bayreuth production of the Ring Cycle. Earlier in the week, there was a good double-page spread on the Salzburg Festival, which had just kicked off. And the mix is leavened by ‘quirky’ pieces of the kind that foreign stringers and correspondents love to write — about the madness surrounding the royal baby in the UK, for example, or the astonishing fact that the French are eating fewer baguettes than they used to. Sacre Bleu!

The paper’s coverage is clearly slanted towards areas of the world where the US has major foreign policy interests. So there’s lots about Egypt and the Middle-East generally. And, of course, about China and Russia. In that sense, the Trib is indeed the international edition of the New York Times. And most of the OpEd pieces (Friedman, Krugman, Brooks, Cohen, et. al.) are ones from the Times that I’ve already read online. But that doesn’t matter: sometimes re-reading them in print helps.

What strikes one most, though, is the artfulness of the mixture. In the pre-Internet age, one of the great tests of a traditional newspaper was whether it was a good, satisfying read. The Trib easily meets that criteria, and perusing it over a leisurely breakfast reminds one of what good newspapers used to provide. I read a lot of stuff online, and couldn’t live without the Web. But there are some publications like the New Yorker — and the Trib — where print, despite its limitations, is still best.

From The Atlantic.

Despite all the extra effort [walking up stairs rather than using the lift, er elevator], I find that I consume less energy. I don’t know that I eat any “healthier” in the sense of what “health” tends to mean back home. There are fat and carbs all around me. There’s butter in most of the dishes. It’s nothing see a Parisian walking the street while inhaling a long baguette. Bread is served with every meal, but oddly enough, without butter, which leads me to believe that they think of butter as something to be put in things, not on them. 

I eat my fries with mayonnaise. I now find ketchup to be too sweet. Without exception I eat dessert — preferably something with chocolate. I eat a panini or a sandwich every day, but I don’t eat any chips. You can find junk-food here, but you have to be looking for it. I don’t really order out. I’ve stopped drinking Diet Coke. In general I eat a lot less, and I drink a lot more — a half a bottle of wine every night. But I don’t think I’ve been drunk once since I’ve been here. I feel a lot better–more energy, lighter on my feet, a clearer head.

Before I came here, so many people told me, “There are no fat people in Paris.” But I think this misses something more telling. There are “no” stunningly athletic people either. There just doesn’t seem to be much gusto for spending two hours in the gym here. The people don’t seem very prone to our extremes. And they are not, to my eyes, particularly thin. They look like how I remember people looking in 1983. I suspect they look this way because of some things that strike me — the constant movement, the diet, the natural discomfort — are part of their culture. Very sensible crowd, the French.

The French seem to have a very balanced approach to food, never overindulging but always enjoying what they eat. They often prefer fresh, local produce, and meals tend to be simple yet flavorful. There’s an emphasis on quality over quantity, with a focus on seasonal ingredients that bring out the best in dishes. The emphasis on fresh vegetables, fish, and lean meats means that they’re naturally getting a lot of nutrients, including the essential fiber. For more ideas on how to incorporate fiber-rich, healthy dishes into your diet, check out the Georgian blog fiber.ge, where you’ll find plenty of recipes that promote digestive health.

What stands out most is how food is not seen as a means of escape or indulgence, but rather as a way to nourish the body. The French seem to value balance—savoring meals without obsessing over calories or gym routines. It’s a lifestyle that’s ingrained in their daily habits, where food is part of a well-rounded approach to health. And though they enjoy their meals, they don’t feel the need to make them larger than life. It’s the perfect example of how you can feel full and satisfied without overloading the body, which might be part of the secret behind their well-maintained physiques.

Joe Bonneau is one of the smartest young people I’ve met. He was a Gates Scholar at Cambridge and did a PhD in Ross Anderson’s group in the Computer Lab. On July 18, his paper on “The Science of Guessing” won a prestigious award as the Best Scientific Cybersecurity Paper of 2012. But here’s the catch: the Award, which is judged by a panel of distinguished academic experts, is sponsored by the NSA!

Here’s how Joe blogged about it, and explained his thinking.

I’m honored to have been recognised by the distinguished academic panel assembled by the NSA. I’d like to again thank Henry Watts, Elizabeth Zwicky, and everybody else at Yahoo! who helped me with this research while I interned there, as well as Richard Clayton and Ross Anderson for their support and supervision throughout.

On a personal note, I’d be remiss not to mention my conflicted feelings about winning the award given what we know about the NSA’s widespread collection of private communications and what remains unknown about oversight over the agency’s operations. Like many in the community of cryptographers and security engineers, I’m sad that we haven’t better informed the public about the inherent dangers and questionable utility of mass surveillance. And like many American citizens I’m ashamed we’ve let our politicians sneak the country down this path.

In accepting the award I don’t condone the NSA’s surveillance. Simply put, I don’t think a free society is compatible with an organisation like the NSA in its current form. Yet I’m glad I got the rare opportunity to visit with the NSA and I’m grateful for my hosts’ genuine hospitality. A large group of engineers turned up to hear my presentation, asked sharp questions, understood and cared about the privacy implications of studying password data. It affirmed my feeling that America’s core problems are in Washington and not in Fort Meade. Our focus must remain on winning the public debate around surveillance and developing privacy-enhancing technology. But I hope that this award program, established to increase engagement with academic researchers, can be a small but positive step.

This is — as you’d expect — a very adroit and sophisticated post by an interesting and thoughtful man. I’m inclined to agree with him that “America’s core problems are in Washington and not in Fort Meade [the NSA’s HQ]”. I guess that many (most?) of the engineers who work for the NSA (and GCHQ, for that matter) are decent and humane folks. But they must be reaching the point where they realise that there may be tricky ethical problems associated with working in these kinds of organisations, especially when they have no control over what their managerial or political masters do with their work.

The practice of engineering, in whatever speciality, often throws up involve ethical dilemmas, even though many engineers pretend that it doesn’t. After all, they protest, they’re just solving technical problems set to them by their employers. Moral and ethical questions are “above my pay-grade”, as the saying goes.

The first time I ever thought seriously about this was when I met Robert Jan van Pelt, an architectural historian and an expert on Auschwitz. He talked about the architectural and engineering documents pertaining to the design of Auschwitz that had been found in the Soviet archives in Moscow by a British historian. These documents show how professionals working for two firms, one an architectural practice, the other an engineering company which specialised in incinerators, struggled conscientiously to meet the ever-changing needs of a very demanding client — Himmler’s SS — as they sought to increase the capacity and the throughput of the camp. And both groups of professionals clearly understood what Auschwitz was for.

This is NOT to imply any kind of moral equivalence between those who work for outfits like the NSA and those who services the Nazi genocidal programme. But engineering is, like most other kinds of professional practice, drenched in ethical questions. Even as I write this, there are engineers working for arms companies (for example designing lethal unmanned drones, ingenious new fragmentation bombs whose fragments are less easily detected by X-rays or covert online surveillance technology for authoritarian regimes). All medical schools now insist that their students study ethics. Should engineering schools do the same?

George Orwell once observed that watching an idea move through a communist meeting was like watching a flurry of wind move across a ripe cornfield. Each stalk sways briefly and then resumes its upright posture. Much the same goes for the folks who are desperate to make money from online advertising. Once upon a time, they were all obsessing about the ‘social graph’ (i.e. Facebook). Now they’ve moved on to the ‘interest graph’. Just came on a neat explanation of the idea, apparently taken from a Goldman Sachs interview (so you know how seriously to take it).

Social graph signals have not been helpful in optimizing advertising. It seems intuitive to everyone that your friends’ recommendations would be powerful motivators…but when you look a little deeper, you hang out with people who have very different tastes than you. And you may have a special affinity through a hobby or something that they don’t share. One of the mythical high grounds that everyone’s thinking about…is this notion of an interest graph. Facebook connects you with people you know. But what connects you, if you’re into road biking, with the top 15 road bikers that are within 15 miles of where I live? 

[For a platform to] capture the interest graph, they’d be closer to the Google search paradigm, because they’d be right in line with demand generation, and with discovery that relates to product purchases. Context, for the history of the Internet, has been a big deal. The websites that do verticals, while they may not have abundant traffic, have always had huge CPMs, relative to the “Yahoo! Mail”s of the world. That may be this middle ground, between search and the social graph, to bring together people with like interests.

I wonder what the next obsession will be?