Organisation Short Quotes

It appears to me impossible that I should cease to exist, or that this active, restless spirit, equally alive to joy and sorrow, should only be organised dust - ready to fly abroad the moment the spring snaps, or the spark goes out, which kept it together. Surely something resides in this heart that is not perishable - and life is more than a dream.

The slow cancellation of the future has been accompanied by a deflation of expectations. There can be few who believe that in the coming year a record as great as, say, the Stooges’ Funhouse or Sly Stone’s There’s A Riot Goin’ On will be released. Still less do we expect the kind of ruptures brought about by The Beatles or disco. The feeling of belatedness, of living after the gold rush, is as omnipresent as it is disavowed. Compare the fallow terrain of the current moment with the fecundity of previous periods and you will quickly be accused of ‘nostalgia’. But the reliance of current artists on styles that were established long ago suggests that the current moment is in the grip of a formal nostalgia, of which more shortly. It is not that nothing happened in the period when the slow cancellation of the future set in. On the contrary, those thirty years has been a time of massive, traumatic change. In the UK, the election of Margaret Thatcher had brought to an end the uneasy compromises of the so-called postwar social consensus. Thatcher’s neoliberal programme in politics was reinforced by a transnational restructuring of the capitalist economy. The shift into so-called Post-Fordism – with globalization, ubiquitous computerization and the casualisation of labour – resulted in a complete transformation in the way that work and leisure were organised. In the last ten to fifteen years, meanwhile, the internet and mobile telecommunications technology have altered the texture of everyday experience beyond all recognition. Yet, perhaps because of all this, there’s an increasing sense that culture has lost the ability to grasp and articulate the present. Or it could be that, in one very important sense, there is no present to grasp and articulate anymore.

For the rest of history, for most of us, our bright promise will always fall short of being actualised; it will never earn us bountiful sums of money or beget exemplary objects or organisations.... Most of us stand poised at the edge of brilliance, haunted by the knowledge of our proximity, yet still demonstrably on the wrong side of the line, our dealings with reality undermined by a range of minor yet critical psychological flaws (a little too much optimism, an unprocessed rebelliousness, a fatal impatience or sentimentality). We are like an exquisite high-speed aircraft which for lack of a tiny part is left stranded beside the runway, rendered slower than a tractor or a bicycle.

Whoo-eeee!” From the corner of her eye, she caught a glimpse of Peter. He was on the road to the side, probably waiting to ensure she’d managed to negotiate the first part of the track. She didn’t stop, her adrenaline pumping. He’d catch up. “Come get me!” she yelled, making a slight counter-direction turn in the air to help her blow into the berm on the other side of the road. The trail crossed a short flat, a marked rock garden, a beam over a bog, another rock drop and berm, a zigzag around massive trees, roots and rocks that kicked the bike’s tyres this way and that and tested her balance, more air over another drop – this one caused by a massive log – enough air for her to do a back flip from a kicker over another part of the forestry trail, steep to the left. The first wall appeared. She took it fast, skidded around to slam into the side of a berm and round off on to another gully crossing. “Whoo-eeee!

Evidence is always partial. Facts are not truth, though they are part of it – information is not knowledge. And history is not the past – it is the method we have evolved of organising our ignorance of the past. It’s the record of what’s left on the record. It’s the plan of the positions taken, when we to stop the dance to note them down. It’s what’s left in the sieve when the centuries have run through it – a few stones, scraps of writing, scraps of cloth. It is no more “the past” than a birth certificate is a birth, or a script is a performance, or a map is a journey. It is the multiplication of the evidence of fallible and biased witnesses, combined with incomplete accounts of actions not fully understood by the people who performed them. It’s no more than the best we can do, and often it falls short of that.

The more we study the question, the more we are brought to the conclusion that society itself is responsible for the anti-social deeds perpetrated in its midst; and that no punishments, no prisons, and no hangmen can diminish the numbers of such deeds; nothing short of a re-organisation of society itself.

So what happened to the comma in this process? Well, between the 16th century and the present day, it became a kind of scary grammatical sheepdog. As we shall shortly see, the comma has so many jobs as a “separator” (punctuation marks are traditionally either “separators” or “terminators”) that it tears about on the hillside of language, endlessly organising words into sensible groups and making them stay put: sorting and dividing; circling and herding; and of course darting off with a peremptory “woof” to round up any wayward subordinate clause that makes a futile bolt for semantic freedom.

For the working class, life was nasty, brutish and short. Hunger and hardship were expected. Men were old at forty, women worn out at thirty-five. The death of children was taken for granted. Poverty was frankly regarded as a moral defect. Social Darwinism (the strong adapt and survive, the weak are crushed) was borrowed and distorted from the Origin of Species (1858) and applied to human organisation.

A myth could not tell a hunter how to kill his prey or how to organise an expedition efficiently, but it helped him to deal with his complicated emotions about the killing of animals. Logos was efficient, practical and rational, but it could not answer questions about the ultimate value of human life nor could it mitigate human pain and sorrow.

how did humans organise themselves in mass-cooperation networks, when they lacked the biological instincts necessary to sustain such networks? The short answer is that humans created imagined orders and devised scripts. These two inventions filled the gaps left by our biological inheritance.

Even back in 1968, the first time I was at the Berlin Film Festival with one of my films, I found it ossified and suffocating. I felt the festival should be opened up to everyone and screen work in other cinemas around the city, so I took the initiative, got hold of some prints by young filmmakers and rented a cinema for a few days in Neukölln, a working-class suburb of Berlin, which at the time was populated largely by immigrants and students. The free screenings at this parallel venue were a big success and generated intense discussions between audiences and filmmakers, which were exciting to witness. The whole thing was my rebellious moment against the Establishment, which I saw as being unnecessarily exclusive. I told the festival organisers they needed to have more free screenings and open the festival up to the wider public, which shortly afterwards they did.

Roderick Spode is the founder of the Saviours of Britain, a fascist organisation better know as the 'Black Shorts'... When you say 'shorts' mean 'shirts', of course. No. By the time Spode formed his association, there were no shirts left. He and his adherents wear black shorts. Footer bags, you mean? Yes. How perfectly foul.

One of the problems is that Dublin is, and I mean literally and topographically, flat - so that everything has to take place on a single plane. Other cities have metro systems, which add depth, and steep hills or skyscrapers for height, but Dublin has only short squat grey buildings and trams that run along the street. And it has no courtyards or roof gardens like continental cities, which at least break up the surface - if not vertically, then conceptually. (...) It’s hard to go very far up in Dublin or very low down, hard to lose yourself or other people, or to gain a sense of perspective. You might think it’s a democratic way to organise a city - so that everything happens face to face, I mean, on equal footing. True, no one is looking down on you all from a height. But it gives the sky a position of total dominance.

There is a curious phenomenon in Western intellectual life, namely that of being right at the wrong time. To be right at the wrong time is far, far worse than having been wrong for decades on end. In the estimation of many intellectuals, to be right at the wrong time is the worst possible social faux pas; like telling an off-colour joke at the throning of a bishop. In short, it is in unforgivable bad taste. There was never a good time, for example, to be anti-communist. Those who early warned of the dangers of bolshevism were regarded as lacking in compassion for the suffering of the masses under tsarism, as well as lacking the necessary imagination to “build” a better world. Then came the phase of denial of the crimes of communism, when to base one’s anti-communism on such phenomena as organised famine and the murder of millions was regarded as the malicious acceptance of ideologically-inspired lies and calumnies. When finally the catastrophic failure of communism could no longer be disguised, and all the supposed lies were acknowledged to have been true, to be anti-communist became tasteless in a different way: it was harping on pointlessly about what everyone had always known to be the case. The only good anti-communist was a mute anti-communist.

In the medium term, AI may automate our jobs, to bring both great prosperity and equality. Looking further ahead, there are no fundamental limits to what can be achieved. There is no physical law precluding particles from being organised in ways that perform even more advanced computations than the arrangements of particles in human brains. An explosive transition is possible, although it may play out differently than in the movies. As mathematician Irving Good realised in 1965, machines with superhuman intelligence could repeatedly improve their design even further, in what science-fiction writer Vernor Vinge called a technological singularity. One can imagine such technology outsmarting financial markets, out-inventing human researchers, out-manipulating human leaders and potentially subduing us with weapons we cannot even understand. Whereas the short-term impact of AI depends on who controls it, the long-term impact depends on whether it can be controlled at all.

how did humans organise themselves in mass-cooperation networks, when they lacked the biological instincts necessary to sustain such networks? The short answer is that humans created imagined orders and devised scripts. These two inventions filled the gaps left by our biological inheritance. However, the appearance of these networks was, for many, a dubious blessing. The imagined orders sustaining these networks were neither neutral nor fair. They divided people into make-believe groups, arranged in a hierarchy.

the planned destruction of Iraq’s agriculture is not widely known. Modern Iraq is part of the ‘fertile crescent’ of Mesopotamia where man first domesticated wheat between 8,000 and 13,000 years ago, and home to several thousand varieties of local wheat. As soon as the US took over Iraq, it became clear its interests were not limited to oil. In 2004, Paul Bremer, the then military head of the Provisional Authority imposed as many as a hundred laws which made short work of Iraq’s sovereignty. The most crippling for the people and the economy of Iraq was Order 81 which deals, among other things, with plant varieties and patents. The goal was brutally clear-cut and sweeping — to wipe out Iraq’s traditional, sustainable agriculture and replace it with oil-chemical-genetically-modified-seed-based industrial agriculture. There was no public or parliamentary debate for the conquered people who never sought war. The conquerors made unilateral changes in Iraq’s 1970 patent law: henceforth, plant forms could be patented — which was never allowed before — while genetically-modified organisms were to be introduced. Farmers were strictly banned from saving their own seeds: this, in a country where, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation, 97 per cent of Iraqi farmers planted only their own saved seeds. With a single stroke of the pen, Iraq’s agriculture was axed, while Order 81 facilitated the introduction and domination of imported, high-priced corporate seeds, mainly from the US — which neither reproduce, nor give yields without their prescribed chemical fertiliser and pesticide inputs. It meant that the majority of farmers who had never spent money on seed and inputs that came free from nature, would henceforth have to heavily invest in corporate inputs and equipment — or go into debt to obtain them, or accept lowered profits, or give up farming altogether.

UNDERSTANDING HUMAN HISTORY IN THE millennia following the Agricultural Revolution boils down to a single question: how did humans organise themselves in mass-cooperation networks, when they lacked the biological instincts necessary to sustain such networks? The short answer is that humans created imagined orders and devised scripts. These two inventions filled the gaps left by our biological inheritance. However, the appearance of these networks was, for many, a dubious blessing. The imagined orders sustaining these networks were neither neutral nor fair. They divided people into make-believe groups, arranged in a hierarchy. The upper levels enjoyed privileges and

Strikes, boycott, parliamentarism, meetings and demonstrations are all good forms of struggle as means for preparing and organising the proletariat. But not one of these means is capable of abolishing existing inequality. All these means must be concentrated in one principal and decisive means; the proletariat must rise and launch a determined attack upon the bourgeoisie in order to destroy capitalism to its foundations. This principal and decisive means is the socialist revolution. The socialist revolution must not be conceived as a sudden and short blow, it is a prolonged struggle waged by the proletarian masses, who inflict defeat upon the bourgeoisie and capture its positions.

More proof that Lynn is still meant to continue with the government programme occurred during the winter of 2000, when she was sitting at a cafeteria table at the area college. It was later in the afternoon when a few people congregated there with books spread out so they could study while drinking coffee or snacking. Many tables were empty, yet after Lynn had been sitting for a few moments, an elderly man sat down across from her. The old man seemed familiar to Lynn, though, at first, she pretended to ignore him. He said nothing, just sat there as someone might when all the tables are filled and it is necessary to share space with a stranger. His presence made her uncomfortable, yet there was nothing specific that alerted her. A short while later, Mac, the man who had been Lynn's handler in Mexico, came out of the shadows and stopped at the table. He was younger than the old man. His clothes were military casual, the type of garments that veteran students who have military experience might recognise, but not think unusual. He leaned over Lynn and kissed her gently on the forehead, spoke quietly to her, and then said 'Wake up, Sleeping Beauty.' Those were the code words that would start the cover programme of which she was still part. The words led to her being switched from the control of the old man, a researcher she now believes may have been part of Dr Ewen Cameron's staff before coming to the United States for the latter part of his career, to the younger man. The change is like a re-enlistment in an army she never willingly joined. In a very real way, she is a career soldier who has never been paid, never allowed to retire and never given a chance to lead a life free from the fear of what she might do without conscious awareness.

Prin let the old one witter on. They could make him stay in here, stop him from leaving and stop him from offering any violence to this dream-image of the old representative, but they couldn’t stop his attention from wandering. The techniques learned in lecture theatres and later honed to perfection in faculty meetings were proving their real worth at last. He could vaguely follow what was being said without needing to bother with the detail. When he’d been a student he had assumed he could do this because he was just so damn smart and basically already knew pretty much all they were trying to teach him. Later, during seemingly endless committee sessions, he’d accepted that a lot of what passed for useful information-sharing within an organisation was really just the bureaucratic phatic of people protecting their position, looking for praise, projecting criticism, setting up positions of non-responsibility for up-coming failures and calamities that were both entirely predictable but seemingly completely unavoidable, and telling each other what they all already knew anyway. The trick was to be able to re-engage quickly and seamlessly without allowing anyone to know you’d stopped listening properly shortly after the speaker had first opened their mouth.

One of the problems is that Dublin is, and I mean literally and topographically, flat - so that everything has to take place on a single plane. Other cities have metro systems, which add depth, and steep hills or skyscrapers for height, but Dublin has only short squat grey buildings and trams that run along the street. And it has no courtyards or roof gardens like continental cities, which at least break up the surface, if not vertically, then conceptually. Have you thought about this before? Maybe even if you haven't, you've noticed it at some subconscious level. It's hard to go very far up in Dublin or very low down, hard to lose yourself or other people, or to gain a sense of perspective. You might think it's a democratic way to organise a city - so that everything happens face to face, I mean, on equal footing. True, no one is looking down on you all from a height. But it gives the sky a position of total dominance. Nowhere is the sky meaningfully punctuated or broken up by anything at all. The Spire, you might point out, and I will concede the Spire, which is anyway the narrowest possible of interruptions, and dangles like a measuring tape to demonstrate the diminutive size of every other edifice around. The totalising effect of the sky is bad for people there. Nothing ever intervenes to block the thing from view. It0s like a memento more. I wish someone would cut a hole in it for you.

If I wished to satirise the present political order I should borrow for it the name which Punch invented during the first German War: Govertisement. This is a portmanteau word and means “government by advertisement.” But my intention is not satiric; I am trying to be objective. The change is this. In all previous ages that I can think of the principal aim of rulers, except at rare and short intervals, was to keep their subjects quiet, to forestall or extinguish widespread excitement and persuade people to attend quietly to their several occupations. And on the whole their subjects agreed with them. They even prayed (in words that sound curiously old-fashioned) to be able to live “a peaceable life in all godliness and honesty” and “pass their time in rest and quietness.” But now the organisation of mass excitement seems to be almost the normal organ of political power. We live in an age of “appeal,” “drives,” and “campaigns.” Our rulers have become like schoolmasters and are always demanding “keenness.” And you notice that I am guilty of a slight archaism in calling them “rulers.” “Leaders” is the modern word. I have suggested elsewhere that this is a deeply significant change of vocabulary. Our demand upon them has changed no less than theirs on us. For of a ruler one asks justice, incorruption, diligence, perhaps clemency; of a leader, dash, initiative, and (I suppose) what people call “magnetism” or “personality.

For the sake of objectivity, the programme analysed both histories - real and alternative - without being informed which was which. It concluded that the second, actual sequence of events was statistically so improbable that it could not possibly happen. ... We are required to believe a) that a drug-addled, womanising inexperienced Catholic with strong links to criminal organisations could defeat the most experienced politician in the country, and that his dire medical condition and dubious character could be kept secret. And also that he could conduct exceptionally successful diplomacy in 1962 while being high as a kite on a coctail of painkillers and stimulants; b) that a president, his brother and several others could all be murdered in a short space of time, by insane gunman, each acting alone, for no discernible reason. Also that Kennedy could be shot by someone with known links to the Soviet Union without there being any consequences; c) that Nixon in office would sanction a pointless burglary, during an election campaign he was bound to win anyway, and that a man with such experience would fail to control the minor political scandal that resulted; d) that 1980 the United States would elect as president an ageing actor with little experience and dyed orange hair.

Promotion stocks came to the retailer ahead of the rest of the market. Also, they usually got an extra lot even after the end of the promotion Newly launched products came to the retailer first. The customers got more choice, faster, leading to favourable word-of-mouth publicity Local display and consumer sampling budgets were always directed liberally at the retailer Vendors ensured that no slow moving inventory was stuck in the retailer’s stores; they wanted nothing to choke the pipeline The retailer also received the best in-class margin from the distributor If some items were in short supply, the vendor would ensure the retailer was the last one to go out of stock In effect, the consumers found more products, fresher stocks and more promotions in the retailer’s stores compared to the general market. This wasn’t something actively created by either the vendors or the retailer, but was a byproduct of good trading practices. Just one move based on a trading community insight— everyone has less money in the bank than needed — hurled the retailer into a virtuous growth cycle, with all the vendors pushing in one direction, with them. Most people in the business would not give a second look at changing these trading practices. If the payment norm is eight days why modify it? Surely the wholesalers, too, know what they’re letting themselves in for? And the vast volumes offered by organised retail should offset the stress of extending credit. Isn’t that how it works? One retailer managed to peep behind the curtain of wholesaler business practices and understood what a boon more money in the bank was to the trade. And look at the gains they reaped for this seemingly insignificant insight!

In a short essay called ‘Liberating Life: Women’s Revolution’, Öcalan (2013) outlines the core tenets of his sociological/historico-philosophical writings. Öcalan’s fundamental claim is that ‘mainstream civilisation’, commences with the enslavement of ‘Woman’, through what he calls ‘Housewifisation’ (2013). As such, it is only through a ‘struggle against the foundations of this ruling system’ (2013), that not only women, but also men can achieve freedom, and slavery can be destroyed. Any liberation of life, for Öcalan, can only be achieved through a Woman’s revolution. In his own words: ‘If I am to be a freedom fighter, I cannot just ignore this: woman’s revolution is a revolution within a revolution’ (2013). For Öcalan, the Neolithic era is crucial, as the heyday of the matricentric social order. The figure of the Woman is quite interesting, and is not just female gender, but rather a condensation of all that is ‘equal’ and ‘natural’ and ‘social’, and its true significance is seen as a mode of social governance, which is non-hierarchical, non-statist, and not premised upon accumulation (2013). This can only be fully seen, through the critique of ‘civilisation’ which is equally gendered and equated with the rise of what he calls the ‘dominant male’ and hegemonic sexuality. These forms of power as coercive are embodied in the institution of masculine civilisation. And power in the matriarchal structures are understood more as authority, they are natural/organic. What further characterised the Neolithic era is the ways through which society was based upon solidarity and sharing – no surplus in production, and a respect for nature. In such a social order, Öcalan finds through his archaeology of ‘sociality’ the traces of an ecological ontology, in which nature is ‘alive and animated’, and thus no different from the people themselves. The ways in which Öcalan figures ‘Woman’, serves as metaphor for the Kurdish nation-as-people (not nation-state). In short, if one manages to liberate woman, from the hegemonic ‘civilisation’ of ‘the dominant male’, one manages to liberate, not only the Kurds, but the world. It is only on this basis that the conditions of possibility for a genuine global democratic confederalism, and a solution to the conflicts of the Middle East can be thinkable. Once it is thinkable, then we can imagine a freedom to organise, to be free from any conception of ownership (of property, persons, or the self), a freedom to show solidarity, to restore balance to life, nature, and other humans through ‘love’, not power. In Rojava, The Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, Öcalan’s political thoughts are being implemented, negotiated and practised. Such a radical experiment, which connects theory with practice has not been seen on this scale, ever before, and although the Rojava administration, the Democratic Union Party, is different from the PKK, they share the same political leader, Öcalan. Central to this experiment are commitments to feminism, ecology and justice.

English and half Nigerian, Stacey had never set foot outside the United Kingdom. Her tight black hair was cut short and close to her head following the removal of her last weave. The smooth caramel skin suited the haircut well. Stacey’s work area was organised and clear. Anything not in the labelled trays was stacked in meticulous piles along the top edge of her desk. Not far behind was Detective Sergeant Bryant who mumbled a ‘Morning, Guv,’ as he glanced into The Bowl. His six foot frame looked immaculate, as though he had been dressed for Sunday school by his mother. Immediately the suit jacket landed on the back of his chair. By the end of the day his tie would have dropped a couple of floors, the top button of his shirt would be open and his shirt sleeves would be rolled up just below his elbows. She saw him glance at her desk, seeking evidence of a coffee mug. When he saw that she already had coffee he filled the mug labelled ‘World’s Best Taxi Driver’, a present from his nineteen-year-old daughter. His filing was not a system that anyone else understood but Kim had yet to request any piece of paper that was not in her hands within a few seconds. At the top of his desk was a framed picture of himself and his wife taken at their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. A picture of his daughter snuggled in his wallet. DS Kevin Dawson, the third member of her team, didn’t keep a photo of anyone special on his desk. Had he wanted to display a picture of the person for whom he felt most affection he would have been greeted by his own likeness throughout his working day. ‘Sorry I’m late, Guv,’ Dawson called as he slid into his seat opposite Wood and completed her team. He wasn’t officially late. The shift didn’t start until eight a.m. but she liked them all in early for a briefing, especially at the beginning of a new case. Kim didn’t like to stick to a roster and people who did lasted a very short time on her team. ‘Hey, Stacey, you gonna get me a coffee or what?’ Dawson asked, checking his mobile phone. ‘Of course, Kev, how’d yer like it: milk, two sugars and in yer lap?’ she asked sweetly, in her strong Black Country accent.

The above comments are intended to justify the emphasis in our discussion on the ways in which scientists produce order. This necessarily involves an examination of the methodical way in which observations and experiences are organised so that sense can be made of them. As already noted, we have every reason to believe that the accomplishment of this kind of task is no mean feat, as is clear from a consideration of the corresponding task faced by the observer when confronted by his field notes. The observer’s task is to transform notes of the kind presented at the beginning of this chapter into an ordered account. But exactly how and where should the observer begin this transformation? It is clear that when seen through the eyes of a total newcomer, the daily comings and goings of the laboratory take on an alien quality. The observer initially encounters a mysterious and apparently unconnected sequence of events. In order to make sense of his observations, the observer normally adopts some kind of theme by which he hopes to be able to construct a pattern. If he can successfully use a theme to convince others of the existence of a pattern, he can be said, at least according to relatively weak criteria, to have “explained’’ his observations. Of course, the selection and adoption of “themes” is highly problematic. For example, the way in which the theme is selected can be held to bear upon the validity of his explanation; the observer’s selection of a theme constitutes his method for which he is accountable. It is not enough simply to fabricate order out of an initially chaotic collection of observations; the observer needs to be able to demonstrate that this fabrication has been done correctly, or, in short, that his method is valid.

The nineteenth century brought no improvement in the ethics of capitalism. The Industrial Revolution that swept through Europe enriched the bankers and capital-owners, but condemned millions of workers to a life of abject poverty. In the European colonies things were even worse. In 1876, King Leopold II of Belgium set up a nongovernmental humanitarian organisation with the declared aim of exploring Central Africa and fighting the slave trade along the Congo River. It was also charged with improving conditions for the inhabitants of the region by building roads, schools and hospitals. In 1885 the European powers agreed to give this organisation control of 2.3 million square kilometres in the Congo basin. This territory, seventy-five times the size of Belgium, was henceforth known as the Congo Free State. Nobody asked the opinion of the territory’s 20–30 million inhabitants. Within a short time the humanitarian organisation became a business enterprise whose real aim was growth and profit. The schools and hospitals were forgotten, and the Congo basin was instead filled with mines and plantations, run by mostly Belgian officials who ruthlessly exploited the local population. The rubber industry was particularly notorious. Rubber was fast becoming an industrial staple, and rubber export was the Congo’s most important source of income. The African villagers who collected the rubber were required to provide higher and higher quotas. Those who failed to deliver their quota were punished brutally for their ‘laziness’. Their arms were chopped off and occasionally entire villages were massacred. According to the most moderate estimates, between 1885 and 1908 the pursuit of growth and profits cost the lives of 6 million individuals (at least 20 per cent of the Congo’s population). Some estimates reach up to 10 million deaths.4

While we want to remember some things as long as possible, we don’t want to clog our brains with irrelevant information. And the way we organise everyday information makes a big difference not only for long-term memories, but short-term as well.

a bottle of champagne after establishing that she does indeed want bubbles. I’ll let her enjoy a glass before I bring up the topic I know will raise a flush to the surface of that slim, golden neck. But she beats me to it, in a roundabout way, when she asks me what I actually do for a living. ‘I know about one bit, obviously.’ She looks down at her glass. ‘But I’m sure Mummy told me you were in finance.’ ‘Yeah. I definitely didn’t tell your mum I owned a sex club,’ I deadpan, and she giggles. ‘So what else do you do?’ ‘I started out in M&A. Worked my arse off. Learnt how to model a company from scratch. Then I went to a hedge fund for a while. Ran some long-short funds.’ I take a sip of champagne. ‘A few years ago, I left with some mates and we struck out on our own. Now we run our own money and we provide leverage for other people who want to do the same.’ She scrunches up her nose. ‘You mean you lend them money?’ ‘Exactly. So they can take riskier positions. We also provide their infrastructure. Trading systems. Compliance. That sort of thing.’ ‘And what do you trade?’ ‘A bit of everything. The way my mates and I have organised things, everyone has their own expertise. Mine’s equity and corporate debt. That’s what I learnt in M&A. Some of the others

Vick rarely allowed herself the luxury of not liking people. No more often than the luxury of liking them. Either one could get you killed. But she was starting to truly despise Risinau. He was vain as a peacock, selfish as a toddler, and for all his high-flown language, she was starting to suspect he was a fool. Truly clever things are said with short words. Long ones are used to hide stupidity. She could see no way this fat dreamer could have organised this uprising alone. Someone a great deal more formidable had done the heavy lifting. And Vick wanted very much to know who. So she nodded along to his nonsense as though she’d never heard such profound revelations.

degree. Short term memory is usually considered to be up to thirty seconds – that’s all – but another part of the brain can be trained to organise and store those perceptions indefinitely. Neuroscientists also believe there is no effective limit to the amount of information a healthy human brain can store in this way if it has had the right sort of training. Detectives who had

Ban short-selling, high speed trading and all other instruments of pure speculation

Working-class parents, who have less spare capacity, are more likely to demand that their kids simply obey them. In the short run this saves time; in the long run it prevents the kids from learning to organise their own lives or think for themselves. Poor parenting is thus a barrier to social mobility, and is becoming more so as the world grows more complex and the rewards for superior cognitive skills increase. Mr Putnam’s research team interviewed dozens of families to illustrate his thesis. Some of their stories are heart-rending. Stephanie, a mother whose husband left her, is asked if her own parents were warm. She is “astonished at our naïveté”. “No, we don’t do all that kissing and hugging,” she says. “You can’t be mushy in Detroit...You gotta be hard, really hard, because if you soft, people will bully you.” Just as her

We have organised our own lives to fit in with machines, much against our own biorhythms (the short night and siesta schedule is better for our bodies) and we expect our newborns to conform with our own industrialised oppression.

Forcing people through pressure brings short-term results at best - in the long run it backfires and the relationship suffers.

This table only counts physical health effects due to disruptions that took place in the Illusion of Control phase. It considers both short-run and long-run effects. Each of the claimed effects is based on a published study about that effect. First on the list is the disruption to vaccination programs for measles, diphtheria, cholera, and polio, which were either cancelled or reduced in scope in some 70 countries. That disruption was caused by travel restrictions. Western experts could not travel, and within many poor countries travel and general activity were also halted in the early days of the Illusion of Control phase. This depressive effect on vaccination programs for the poor is expected to lead to large loss of life in the coming years. The poor countries paying this cost are most countries in Africa, the poorer nations in Asia, such as India, Indonesia and Myanmar, and the poorer countries in Latin America. The second listed effect in the table relates to schooling. An estimated 90% of the world’s children have had their schooling disrupted, often for months, which reduces their lifetime opportunities and social development through numerous direct and indirect pathways. The UN children’s organisation, UNICEF, has released several reports on just how bad the consequences of this will be in the coming decades.116 The third element in Joffe’s table refers to reports of economic and social primitivisation in poor countries. Primitivisation, also seen after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, is just what it sounds like: a regression away from specialisation, trade and economic advancement through markets to more isolated and ‘primitive’ choices, including attempted economic self-sufficiency and higher fertility. Due to diminished labour market prospects, curtailed educational activities and decreased access to reproductive health services, populations in the Illusion of Control phase began reverting to having more children precisely in those countries where there is already huge pressure on resources. The fourth and fifth elements listed in the table reflect the biggest disaster of this period, namely the increase in extreme poverty and expected famines in poor countries. Over the 20 years leading up to 2020, gradual improvements in economic conditions around the world had significantly eased poverty and famines. Now, international organisations are signalling rapid deterioration in both. The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) now expects the world to have approximately an additional 100 million extremely poor people facing starvation as a result of Covid policies. That will translate into civil wars, waves of refugees and huge loss of life. The last two items in Joffe’s table relate to the effect of lower perinatal and infant care and impoverishment. Millions of preventable deaths are now expected due to infections and weakness in new mothers and young infants, and neglect of other health problems like malaria and tuberculosis that affect people in all walks of life. The whole of the poor world has suffered fewer than one million deaths from Covid. The price to be paid in human losses in these countries through hunger and health neglect caused by lockdowns and other restrictions is much, much larger. All in the name of stopping Covid.

Understanding Financial Risks and Companies Mitigate them? Financial risks are the possible threats, losses and debts corporations face during setting up policies and seeking new business opportunities. Financial risks lead to negative implications for the corporations that can lead to loss of financial assets, liabilities and capital. Mitigation of risks and their avoidance in the early stages of product deployment, strategy-planning and other vital phases is top-priority for financial advisors and managers. Here's how to mitigate risks in financial corporates:- ● Keeping track of Business Operations Evaluating existing business operations in the corporations will provide a holistic view of the movement of cash-flows, utilisation of financial assets, and avoiding debts and losses. ● Stocking up Emergency Funds Just as families maintain an emergency fund for dealing with uncertainties, the same goes for large corporates. Coping with uncertainty such as the ongoing pandemic is a valuable lesson that has taught businesses to maintain emergency funds to avoid economic lapses. ● Taking Data-Backed Decisions Senior financial advisors and managers must take well-reformed decisions backed by data insights. Data-based technologies such as data analytics, science, and others provide resourceful insights about various economic activities and help single out the anomalies and avoid risks. Enrolling for a course in finance through a reputed university can help young aspiring financial risk advisors understand different ways of mitigating risks and threats. The IIM risk management course provides meaningful insights into the other risks involved in corporations. What are the Financial Risks Involved in Corporations? Amongst the several roles and responsibilities undertaken by the financial management sector, identifying and analysing the volatile financial risks. Financial risk management is the pinnacle of the financial world and incorporates the following risks:- ● Market Risk Market risk refers to the threats that emerge due to corporational work-flows, operational setup and work-systems. Various financial risks include- an economic recession, interest rate fluctuations, natural calamities and others. Market risks are also known as "systematic risk" and need to be dealt with appropriately. When there are significant changes in market rates, these risks emerge and lead to economic losses. ● Credit Risk Credit risk is amongst the common threats that organisations face in the current financial scenarios. This risk emerges when a corporation provides credit to its borrower, and there are lapses while receiving owned principal and interest. Credit risk arises when a borrower falters to make the payment owed to them. ● Liquidity Risk Liquidity risk crops up when investors, business ventures and large organisations cannot meet their debt compulsions in the short run. Liquidity risk emerges when a particular financial asset, security or economic proposition can't be traded in the market. ● Operational Risk Operational risk arises due to financial losses resulting from employee's mistakes, failures in implementing policies, reforms and other procedures. Key Takeaway The various financial risks discussed above help professionals learn the different risks, threats and losses. Enrolling for a course in finance assists learners understand the different risks. Moreover, pursuing the IIM risk management course can expose professionals to the scope of international financial management in India and other key concepts.

Being a true leader, as opposed to a competent manager, requires a willingness to get your hands dirty. I have said before that I do not expect anyone to do a job I cannot do myself. While this is clearly unrealistic as a company grows and expands, the perception of being willing to step in and assist must remain. The weight of leadership includes staying calm while others panic and coming up with solutions rather than joining the chorus of complaints. The Covid-19 pandemic has certainly helped distinguish the leaders from the managers. Leaders are prepared to take responsibility when things go wrong, even if the true responsibility lies with someone else. Leaders are visible. Leaders have a vision, even if it is only short term. I don’t really believe in long-term planning. I make up the rules of the game based on one-year plans. This means I always retain visibility and control. Five years is too long a time to have any certainty that the objectives will be met. Leadership is not a popularity contest, but it also should not inspire fear. Leaders earn respect and loyalty, recognising that these take a long time to earn and a second to lose. A leader is not scared of collaboration and listening to the opinions of others, as well as accepting help when it’s needed. Leadership is not a quality that you are born with, it is something that you learn over time. I was not a leader in my Coronation days, and I am the first to admit that I made a lot of mistakes. Even at African Harvest, as much as I achieved financial success and tried different techniques to earn respect, I never truly managed to deal with the unruly investment team. But, having built on years of experience, by the time I hit my stride at Sygnia, I was a leader. Within any organisation of substantial size, there is space for more than one leader, whether they head up divisions or the organisation itself. There are several leaders across Sygnia weaving the fabric of our success. I am no longer the sole leader, having passed the baton on to others in pursuit of my own dreams. To quote the Harvard Business Review, ‘The competencies most frequently required for success at the top of any sizable business include strategic orientation, market insight, results orientation, customer impact, collaboration and influence, organisational development, team leadership, and change leadership.’ That is what I looked for in my successor, and that is what I found in David. I am confident that all the leaders I have groomed are more than capable of taking the company forwards.

In relation to these learning styles, psychologists have also identified other associated psychological, neurological, and personality characteristics. The students with preferences for the auditory-sequential learning style are more inclined to have extrovert personalities, while the students who prefer the visual-spatial learning style are inclined to possess introvert personalities. Extrovert personalities are more outgoing, engage in discussions, and respond easily, even with relatively unknown people, and they enjoy social activities with a large number of participants. On the contrary, introverts prefer attending to things on their own with less interaction with others, especially with relatively unknown people, and dislike social activities with large attendance. Auditory-sequential learners are good in analysis and pay more attention to specific detail; they approach solving a complex problem by dividing it into smaller parts. On the other hand, visual-spatial learners are good synthesisers, who can relate different perspectives to form an answer and are better at seeing the big picture or are holistic. As we would expect, auditory-sequential learners deal better with the concept of time and are better organised, while visual-spatial learners are relatively less competent with the concept of time. Auditory-sequential learners think in words and are better in rote memorisation; visual-spatial learners think in pictures and need to relate contextual meanings with pictures and, as a result, struggle with rote memorisation. That is, auditory-sequential learners have better auditory short-term memory, while visual-spatial learners have better visual long-term memory. Further, since they think in pictures, visual-spatial learners take a relatively longer time to process and relate information to contexts; once they do that, this contextual information is retained longer in memory.

Why invest in Stocks? Answer: 1) You can ‘own’ multiple businesses 2) Working hours are defined 3) No retirement age 4) Work from Anywhere 5) No organisation required 6) Fully scaleable - can buy 1 or 1 million shares at the same price 7) Quickest Liquidity 8) You can ‘bunk your ‘business days’ at your will, for as long as you wish, and get back as conveniently 9) All the ‘compliances’ headache is minus 10) Payments headaches are Zero. 11) Can make money on both side. 12) Get to know ‘Like Minded’ people without meeting them. 13) The kick of ‘identifying’ some businesses ahead of ‘The Aces’ is impeccably fulfilling.

Any opportunity which is freely open for all, is invariably not an opportunity.

One of the most challenging (yet also rewarding) aspects of knowledge work is that it requires our creativity. And creativity can’t really be sustained without a sense of motivation. You can’t keep doing your best thinking and contributing your best ideas if you’re burned out and demoralized. What does our motivation depend on? Mostly, on making consistent progress. We can endure quite a bit of stress and frustration in the short term if we know it’s leading somewhere.

Her mother bought her a burgundy pair of VANS summer shoes in Italy, and they took a picture of her laughing happily while holding them in her hand in an exaggerated scene, as if they had been teasing him to take a picture of her for her boyfriend in a park somewhere in Italy. Shortly after, she started wearing them in Barcelona and cut off the tiny VANS logo with a scissor. When I asked her why, she tried to avoid answering at first until she said something like she didn't like it, or that they looked better without the tiny black VANS logos. It was suspicious that someone must have told her the urban legend in Barcelona soon after her Italian vacation, that VANS stands for „Vans Are Nazi Shoes.” It became more and more obvious in Barcelona that my life was in danger, as an awful vibe surrounded us due to the construction. It was mostly caused by rich tourists who I had never seen do much work in life, too high to take on a task as simple as changing a password on a bank account on an iPhone app – a crime organisation, quite international already and increasingly so, with a growing number of participants and secrets becoming more and more dangerous, I thought, and I wasn’t wrong, I just couldn’t see the whole picture yet as I was blindfolded. As if her nickname, Stupid Bunny which she had printed out at Ample Store with Adam, was a cute, nice thing, a reassurance after the day before she had been crying for some unknown reason and printing out the phrase, “You never loved me, you just broke my heart.” That couldn't have been further from the truth. She would fidget around and draw at home, and I didn't realise she was bored of being with me when she had so many other options in her mind because of what others had fed her, as if I was a monogamist who wouldn’t forgive her for cheating or making a mistake. Even if I had seen her, when she showed up at home she seemed in love with herself, watching herself in the mirror in her new tight, short shorts. It was weird. I had noticed something strange in Martina for a while now and I couldn’t put my finger on it. I thought it was only the drugs she was secretly doing behind my back, but I was far away from having all the answers.

In short: the Ringvereine regulated organised crime in Berlin and had divided the city into different precincts. The police did nothing since the underworld was easier to control if it regulated itself, and excesses like those on Breslauer Strasse were rare.

Over the past thirty years the orthodox view that the maximisation of shareholder value would lead to the strongest economic performance has come to dominate business theory and practice, in the US and UK in particular.42 But for most of capitalism’s history, and in many other countries, firms have not been organised primarily as vehicles for the short-term profit maximisation of footloose shareholders and the remuneration of their senior executives. Companies in Germany, Scandinavia and Japan, for example, are structured both in company law and corporate culture as institutions accountable to a wider set of stakeholders, including their employees, with long-term production and profitability their primary mission. They are equally capitalist, but their behaviour is different. Firms with this kind of model typically invest more in innovation than their counterparts focused on short-term shareholder value maximisation; their executives are paid smaller multiples of their average employees’ salaries; they tend to retain for investment a greater share of earnings relative to the payment of dividends; and their shares are held on average for longer by their owners. And the evidence suggests that while their short-term profitability may (in some cases) be lower, over the long term they tend to generate stronger growth.43 For public policy, this makes attention to corporate ownership, governance and managerial incentive structures a crucial field for the improvement of economic performance. In short, markets are not idealised abstractions, but concrete and differentiated outcomes arising from different circumstances.

If you gather a team of experienced leaders and ask them why past projects failed, the explanations flow readily: The project was bigger than we realised . . . we were too slow . . . our design was flawed . . . we were operating from faulty assumptions . . . the market changed . . . we had the wrong people . . . our technology didn’t work . . . our strategy was unclear . . . our costs were too high . . . our organisation sabotaged us . . . the competition was tougher than we thought . . . we reorganised ourselves to death . . . we fought among ourselves . . . our strategy was flawed . . . our strategy was good but our execution was lousy . . . we ran into unexpected bottlenecks . . . we misunderstood our customers . . . we were short on resources . . . the economics didn’t work . . . we got killed by internal politics . . .

The heroism Kranz displayed in that situation wasn’t physical heroism, military heroism or political heroism, but organisational heroism, which is arguably every bit as important but which often gets short shrift. Compounded of tenacity, imagination, shrewd judgement, self-awareness and sheer willpower, it’s a form of heroism that’s desperately needed today and that is in especially short supply in most failed launch attempts.

Such comforting certitudes were upended only a few years later when a repentant Hindu priest, captured by India’s National Investigation Agency, volunteered a shattering confession: that the attack at Mecca masjid had been one of several staged by a militant Hindu group which, he said, was intimately connected with the parent body of the BJP. The organisation counted among its members, the swami disclosed, an officer of the Indian Army.7

Normal people lay down, closed their eyes and controlled their conscious minds for a short while. Lists would be made, chores would be identified, the day’s events analysed and the following day organised. But then some magic would occur when the mind took control and offered its own thoughts, a delicious state of limbo where the sleeper was no longer the driver but the passenger being guided into unconsciousness by their own mind.

Keep it Simple n Sweet Engaging ......and Real What ............is Simple? The Simple is Useable Simple is organised ..clear Short...only relevant points Engaging ..is attached Real...can correlate. Lucid..clear ..easy to understand The simple has honesty Simple has a purpose. Hard work........is basic Smart work adds ideas. Street smart is non bookish Creativity adds imagination. Intution is...... gut sense Curiosity is inquistive mind. Genius is extreme intelligznce Stupidity.genius in craziness

If the ideal with regard to work is to get rid of it, every method that 'reduces the work load' is a good thing. The most potent method, short of automation, is the so-called 'division of labour' and the classical example is the pin factory eulogised in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations.' Here it is not a matter of ordinary specialisation, which mankind has practised from time immemorial, but of dividing up every complete process of production into minute parts, so that the final product can be produced at great speed without anyone having had to contribute more than a totally insignificant and, in most cases, unskilled movement of his limbs. The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be at least threefold: to give a man a chance to utilise and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his egocentredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence. Again, the consequences that flow from this view are endless. To organise work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal: it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence. Equally, to strive for leisure as an alternative to work would be considered a complete misunderstanding of one of the basic truths of human existence, namely that work and leisure are complementary parts of the same living process and cannot be separated without destroying the joy of work and the bliss of leisure.

In short, a one-party dominant state can advantage a polity. It can bring about stability through continuity of leadership and policies. This can enhance the predictability of government and its policies, thereby contributing to long-term goals. Such a state would be able to organise relevant groups through co-option and if this fails, through coercion. Such states can undertake effective mobilisation of its people and successfully maintain diversity. One-party dominant states are also adept in pursuing long-term based strategies, policies and objectives that can result in the development of strong economies as happened in Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea.

Many leadership development strategies fall short because they confuse leader development with leadership development. An easy mistake to make in the short term, yet perniciously lethal in the long term. Leader development is about ensuring a pipeline of leaders with the right skills for the roles they perform. Leadership development on the other hand is about the evolution of an organization’s leadership culture. Investments in leader development result in a skill and knowledge-based culture, while a focus on leadership development results in a future-ready purpose-based culture.

Why invest in Stocks? Answer: 1) You can own multiple businesses 2) Working hours are defined 3) No retirement age 4) Work from Anywhere 5) No organisation required 6) Fully scaleable - can buy 1 or 1 million shares at the same price 7) Quickest Liquidity 8) You can ‘bunk’ your ‘business’ days at your will, for as long as you wish, and get back as conveniently.

Royal Navy officer James Cook was despatched into the Pacific by the British government. He was to go to Tahiti to watch and measure the transit of Venus — one of many observations from around the world organised by the Royal Society to better measure the distance of the sun from the earth.

On the eve of war the Jews were far better prepared, militarily and politically, than the Arabs, in Palestine or beyond. Their leaders had a high level of confidence that they would prevail if it came to a fight, as they assumed it would.13 The Haganah had a centralized command. It could field 35,000 men, including the 2,500-strong Palmah. The ‘dissidents’ of the Irgun and Stern Gang accounted for a few thousand more, in total making up an extraordinarily large percentage of the adult Jewish population. Approximately 27,000 Jews had enlisted with British forces during the war. In addition, the institutions of the Yishuv exercised national discipline. ‘The Jewish Agency … is really a state within a state with its own budget, secret cabinet, army, and above all, intelligence service’, observed Richard Crossman, the British Labour MP who had visited Palestine as a member of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry. ‘It is the most efficient, dynamic, toughest organisation I have ever seen.’14 If it came to war, he predicted, the Haganah would trounce the Arabs. Crossman’s was an astute assessment (and at odds with the view of the British military).15 Still, his confidence was not widely shared. ‘We knew that 635,000 Jews were facing hundreds of millions of Arabs: “the few against the many”’, Uri Avnery, a young German-born Jew, wrote shortly afterwards. ‘We knew: if we surrender, we die.’16 Volunteering was the norm among Jewish youth: Tikva Honig-Parnass, a seventeen-year-old Hebrew University student, enlisted in the Haganah in November 1947. ‘It was well-known on campus who was a member’, she recalled.