Seamus Heaney was my idea of what a great Irishman should be: deeply conscious and proud of his ancestry, yet alive to the vicious contradictions of our history. Alert to his eminence, yet never trading on it — a sensible move in a society famous for its “begrudgers”, the folks who are forever seeking to cut down any tall poppy that dares to raise its head. They called him “Famous Seamus”, but the epithet never did him any damage.

One of the few things that made me proud of my country in recent years was the discovery that, at the state banquet to mark Queen Elizabeth’s landmark visit to Ireland, Heaney was seated at the top table, opposite the Queen. It was such a lovely change to see that a country which for so many years vilified and ignored its writers (“the old sow that eats her farrow”, as Joyce put it) finally had the grace to recognise a native genius.

I’ve always loved his poetry, especially the way he captured the tactility of things — the smell of sodden flax, the heft of a spade or the weight of a sod of turf. Here he is writing about helping his mother fold the bedlinen:

The cool that came off sheets just off the line
Made me think the damp must still be in them
But when I took my corners of the linen
And pulled against her, first straight down the hem
And then diagonally, then flapped and shook
The fabric like a sail in a cross-wind,
They made a dried-out undulating thwack.
So we’d stretch and fold and end up hand to hand
For a split second as if nothing had happened
For nothing had that had not always happened
Beforehand, day by day, just touch and go,
Coming close again by holding back
In moves where I was x and she was o
Inscribed in sheets she’d sewn from ripped-out flour sacks.

He evoked wonderful responses in people. After he’d had his stroke he was rushed to hospital in Letterkenny in Donegal. Bill Clinton was in Northern Ireland at the time on peace process business, and when he heard about Heaney, he secretly changed his schedule and raced to Letterkenny, astonishing the hospital staff, and no doubt the poet himself. At that moment Clinton went up a mile in my estimation. I cannot imagine a contemporary politician who has that kind of sensibility.

Seamus will have one hell of a funeral. And, who knows, maybe Clinton will come.

A key ingredient of a democratic society is the existence of free media that can hold power to account. One essential requirement for free media is the ability of journalists to protect the identity of their sources – a contemporary equivalent of the sanctity of the confessional in earlier times, but with a public interest dimension. The existence of comprehensive surveillance – plus the legal intimidation that goes with it (a la Miranda) – makes it impossible to protect confidential sources. That’s why WikiLeaks’s development of a secure, anonymous drop-box was such a significant innovation. But, given what we now know about the capabilities of the NSA and GCHQ, I don’t think any journalist could now, in good faith, give an undertaking of confidentiality to any source with whom s/he communicated electronically.

One big puzzle for me is why so many journalists – at least in Britain – don’t seem to appreciate how radical the threat to journalism has become. After all – as Peter Preston pointed out in a terrific column yesterday – the next David Miranda might be working for the Daily Mail.

In the British case, there are probably local factors at work – in particular the visceral hatred that the tabloid press has for the Guardian. [Full disclosure: I write for the Observer, which is a sister paper of the Guardian.]

You think I jest? A few years ago, one of the people who worked most closely with Tony Blair when he was prime minister observed to one of my academic colleagues that during the Blair premiership one rule-of-thumb for news management in Downing Street was that “the best way to bury a story was to have it published on the front page of the Guardian“. When my colleague expressed puzzlement, he explained: “because then the Daily Mail wouldn’t touch it”.

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.