Brian Eno (former keyboard player for Roxy Music turned producer turned genius) came up with the oblique strategies as a codification of the creativity techniques he'd been putting into practice. Produced as a set of cards, each had a point, or an exhortation to action that could help you out of a jam by giving you a new perspective on what you had been doing anyway, or by giving you a path to some idea/ action in the future. For instance, card one read "Honour thy mistake as hidden intention". Whilst some of the cards make more sense in some scenarios than others, they are all valuable when you really don't know what option to take. Eno, typically, does not prescribe any one approach to using the cards, but suggests that you could draw randomly or flick through until you find one that suits. It really is up to the user to derive the benefit they want from them.
....and if this were a politics course, you'd get at least 5 minutes of SP a week (because Mssrs Parker and Stone are, as are all the best satirists, tremendously shrewd commentators). But as this isn't, the only thing that came to mind for business was the non strategy of the gnomes:
Beware, as a drone in your post graduation jobs, this is what you will get from management when they try to sell you a lemon internally. These same people will then wonder why they get low productivity and no gratitude. The thicker skinned members of the kakistocracy will content themselves with their fat paychecks and the thinner skinned will engage in relentless self abuse battery about why nobody likes their whining arse. A good article: Human Resources from an Organizational Behavior Perspective: Some Paradoxes Explained by Jeffrey Pfeffer, Journal of Economic Perspectives Volume 21, Number 4 —Fall 2007—Pages 115–134
The intro to The Trap, by Adam Curtis is pretty thought provoking, in the sense that you might see a problem with our view of freedom, in this sense, a tension between market liberty and individual autonomy. It's also a slightly false reading in the sense that the "libertarian" governments cited have also always been enthusiastic legislators.
Treasure trove of articles on the Hopper bros. Puritan Gift site, especially on where quality comes from. The book is a very overdue corrective to the "management as empirical science" school. In fact, if anything, it really needs a companion volume that can truly point out that the field of management science is less scientific than homeopathy, and homeopathy at least isn't going to do any harm.
I stand with the FT in my two thumbs up verdict on the book. However, I have a supposition that as yet I can't get round to proving that the real position on management and long run productivity is even more depressing, that is that long run productivity growth is very nearly a constant and that no regime changes it. I'll have another look at the data here.
The Observer has chosen not to put its excellent article on how t3h internets has saved classical music online. (It's in the Review section for the paper copy, 6th January, Year of our Lord 2008). This is a pity as its a very good article giving a more hopeful view of the web for content industries than the usual propaganda. (I'm very tired of reading made up estimates of piracy losses). Obviously cohering with the "Long Tail" group of models ( blog here), and worth a read if you can get hold of it!
Anthropologist Scott Atran has done the research on the growth of suicide terrorism (yes, it has been a growing phenomenon, and no the Tamil Tigers are not currently the leading practitioners). The paper linked here from the Washington Quarterly, has some interesting and surprising points to make. The key one for me is understanding the dynamics of the small group. Its the nature of small organisations to be able to police commitment, thus making it more likely that someone would carry out an attack.
