My favourite newsagent has begun selling coffee. Today, a sign has appeared outside his premises. It’s headed “Coffee Solutions!” and includes a list of the various kinds of coffee on offer inside. Which led me to think about what kind of problem is it to which coffee is a ‘solution’? Sleepiness? Boredom? The need for a break from work?

Of course, in a literal sense coffee is a solution — defined as “a homogeneous mixture composed of only one phase”. But I don’t think that’s the sense envisaged by the person who composed the newsagent’s notice. S/he was simply parroting the almost-ubiquitous abuse of the term in contemporary commercial life. Once upon a time, people sold products or services. Nowadays they sell only solutions.

And ‘solutionism’ (to use Evgeny Morozov’s term) is everywhere in the tech industry.

If a ‘solution’ is “a means of solving a problem”, then often it isn’t really a big deal. Many years ago, Donald Schön, in a wonderful book entitled The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action (Arena), pointed out that, in the grand scheme of things, problems are not the biggest difficulties that confront us. That’s because, in essence, a ‘problem’ is a pretty straightforward thing: a perceived discrepancy between a known present state and a known desired state. It may be difficult to find a ‘solution’ but at least in principle it’s clear what needs to be done.

Most of the really difficult, intractable things in organizational, political and ordinary life, however, do not fit that description, because we usually are unsure or in disagreement about where we are, and even more so about where we want to go. They are not ‘problems’ but something else: messy, unclear, contentious. And what professionals do, Schön argued, is to take these messy difficulties and do some work on them to extract some of their constituent ‘problems’ for which known solutions exist.

So, for example, if I want to write a Will that will be fair to my children from different marriages and wish to minimise the amount of inheritance tax that they will pay, I take that to a lawyer who will analyse my current situation and my (vague) wishes and suggest some legal ‘solutions’ (perhaps Trusts) which will meet some of my needs or desires.

In Schön’s view, therefore, professionals are not problem-solvers, but problem-creators. Reading his book changed my life, because it made me look at the occupational world in an entirely new way.

And, having written all that, I definitely need a coffee.

Extraordinary piece in the Guardian, based on what an Australian palliative care nurse learned from listening to terminal patients. According to her, their five “greatest regrets” are:

1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.

3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

Coming in August.

One of the most interesting things I’ve read in the last few days is this fascinating blog post by Robert Peston in which he suggests that the recent turmoil in China’s money markets, the sharp reduction in the flow of credit between banks and the rising cost of loans between banks might presage the kind of financial collapse that countries like Ireland experienced in 2008. As I was pondering the implications of this I read in today’s Observer that Bentley (whose 19.2 mpg Flying Spur retails at £140,000) plans to open 45 dealerships across China in the next two years, and doubt hardened into certainty: the Chinese are locked into a credit bubble, and we all know how those end.

From the 2011 Report of the Intelligence Services Commissioner:

The purpose of section 7 [of the Intelligence Services Act] is to ensure that certain SIS or GCHQ activity overseas, which might otherwise expose its officers or agents to liability for prosecution in the UK, is, where authorised by the Secretary of State, exempted from such liability. I would however emphasise that the Secretary of State, before granting each authorisation, must be satisfied of the necessity and reasonableness of the act authorised.

This is the Section that MPs used to call “the James Bond section” when it was going through Parliament in 1994.

We were in Dublin a couple of weeks ago and on a glorious summer’s evening found ourselves in Trinity College, watching a desultory cricket match. Suddenly I noticed that the (redbrick) building that used to be Finn’s Hotel was visible in the background, and I was delighted to see that the sign painted on the gable end has survived. I didn’t have a zoom lens, so the enlargement of that part of the image will have to do.

Joyce fans will not need reminding that Nora Barnacle worked as a chambermaid in Finn’s, and the first time James laid eyes on her was when he was walking down Nassau Street and saw her emerging from the premises. On the evening of June 16, 1904, he picked her up from the hotel and they walked southwards together for what was to become the defining moment of his life. The rest, as they say, is history. And we celebrate the results of it today.

The 2013 Lee Lecturer — Professor Margaret Macmillan, originally uploaded by jjn1.

On Thursday, Professor Margaret Macmillan gave the 2013 Lee Seng Tee Lecture at Wolfson. Her topic: the origins of the First World War. One of the factors she identified was the weakness of political leaders unable to control or restrain their military establishments. In the Q&A afterwards she mentioned the Cuban Missile Crisis and JFK’s ability to resist the belligerent demands of his generals for military action against the Soviet Union and Cuba. Macmillan identified two factors which led Kennedy to resist. One was his bitter experience of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, which had resulted from his willingness to accept military advice. The other was the fact that he happened to be reading Barbara’s Tuchman’s wonderful book, The Guns of August, about the outbreak of the 1914-18 war, and how the world slipped into catastrophe.

I love this. A web designer was so appalled by the aesthetics of the PRISM PowerPoint deck that she redesigned it to show what a proper web-savvy designer would do with it.

Best thing since Peter Norvig re-cast Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address as a PowerPoint presentation.

Nick Bilton has nice piece in the New York Times about the echo-chamber effect one gets when too many people of the same mindset are gathered together in the same location. The peg for it is Twist, an App for folks who are tired of having to text one another about ETAs when rushing to make meetings. Bilton’s question: does anybody else other than frenetic Silicon Valley types need such a thing?

Is Twist a great idea, or are Mr. Belshe and Mr. Lee [Twist’s inventors] falling into a local propensity for creating a product for technophile friends rather than the public?

Sometimes, Hollywood screenwriters create scripts filled with inside jokes that only people in Hollywood could appreciate. Sometimes, New York media writers write about other New York media writers. And sometimes, tech entrepreneurs in San Francisco and Silicon Valley to the south create companies best appreciated by other people who live and breathe technology.

Twist is hardly the only start-up whose target audience does not seem to extend far from San Francisco Bay. Among many, there’s BlackJet, which offers “affordable private jet” solutions for people in the area. And there’s Swig, which connects people with local liquor stores that provide home deliveries.

“One of the most important lessons I’ve learned is that we are guilty in the Valley of designing things for ourselves, and we are not the target market,” said Andy Smith, who is the co-author of “The Dragonfly Effect,” a book about marketing, technology and entrepreneurship.