CLARENDON HOUSE PUBLICATIONS

In my work with small businesses around the world a couple of decades ago, I noted a number of common failings. As an example of these, in the area of personnel, there appeared to be a point beyond which the individual business person struggled to come to terms with the fact that in order to properly expand he or she had to actively hand over jobs to others and then stand by and watch them perform those jobs with much less competence than he had himself or herself. Faced wi

Returning in the early 1990s to the UK after 26 years in Australia and the United States, it was my pleasure to work with many small to medium-sized enterprises in this country and to find all over the place a great spirit of making things happen against all kinds of odds. This was encouraging in the extreme to anyone in the business of helping business, as I was at that time. It was not possible to work for long as a consultant, though, without being aware of the constant

Our society as a general rule expects instant gratification. Older generations had to wait for certain vegetables to appear in the shops; if they wanted to know something, they had to go to the library; if they needed to call someone, they had to find a telephone box. And to accumulate wealth, they often had to make plans that spanned decades or more, and be consistently thrifty. Today’s expectations are different: foods of all kinds are shipped to our supermarkets from all

So why do we need myths? A standard answer might be formulated along the lines of ‘because humanity needs meaning, and myth was a first attempt to seek meaning in the universe around us’. But there we go with that historical thing again, as though somehow ‘primitive humans’ woke up one day and looked around and decided that what they saw needed some kind of ‘explanation’. We’ve seen throughout this series that ‘myth’ isn’t just an earlier form of literature but a kind of

One evening, many years ago, I was in a room listening to someone describe an event in their lives. This person was a known compulsive talker - someone whose conversation consisted of a continuous one-way flow, into which it was difficult to interject a single word and from which it was very difficult to extricate oneself. One’s normal instinct, upon being ‘trapped’ in a room with such a person, was to find some excuse to escape. But in this particular instance it was just hi

I recently posted something on Facebook to do with a babysitter. You may have seen this ‘doing the rounds’ on social media, but if you missed it, here is the original text in full: when i was 12 i babysat this girl for a few years and she would come to me and show me her art, drag me by my wrists and point at the pieces she’d made during the week. and she’d be like “do the voice” and i’d put on a sports-announcer olympics-style voice and be like “such form! this level of co

Today’s socio-cultural model could be argued to be based on the drive or urge to find the satisfaction and sense of ‘place’ which earlier models had but which has been progressively lost. Yes, it is all about constant growth and the accumulation of wealth, but that wealth is then supposed to be used to find meaning and depth in living, a sense of security, and a fixedness in a higher condition. The modern seeks a fixed universe too, but one in which he or she is comfortably a

So what are we trying to do when we say ‘grow’? I’ve argued that the compulsion to grow commercially or economically is just that - a compulsion, driven by social, cultural and perhaps psychological pressures that we have become so used to that to question them seems heretical. It’s part of the general belief that modern life consists of being active, reaching for some kind of advancement, defeating competition, striving to be ‘upwardly mobile’, and so on. Unless one is eng