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Category: Business & Communities

17 ways to increase the productivity of new professors

Published January 3, 2010 by Jo Jordan

The wandering university teacher

Displaced from my own country, I have been “on the road” now for 7 years.  In that time, I have taught at five different universities and colleges with quite different characters.  They have varied from the old to the new.  Students have come from all over the world.  And the staff ‘gave a damn’, or ‘didn’t’.

What my experiences have taught me is that there is a steep learning curve adjusting to the culture of a school.  ‘Old’ universities allowed for this by having long settling in periods.  People did not have a full teaching load at the outset and their responsibilities in other areas were reduced too.  There was often elaborate support outside the college with subsidized housing, sports facilities, etc.

17 ways to get a new lecturer up-to-speed quickly

In these days when colleges churn their staff and try to make every penny out of them that they can, it makes sense to manage the learning curve of their lecturers and professors.  This is what I have learned from my moves.

  1. Allocate some time to learn the culture of your school.   Arrange for people to observe various classes and pick up what works and what doesn’t.  I had the opportunity to do that at one school and something as simple as walking away from the podium into the audience, where the light was better, seemed to make students with happier.  I suspect students are sensitive to lecturer’s facial expressions and they need to see our faces.
  2. Have communication channels and time available for lecturers to hear and react to students reactions to classes.   Whatever method you choose, don’t divert student reactions to junior tutors or managers, neither of whom can pass feedback  on effectively.  When they receive feedback, positive or negative, their job should be to facilitate a meeting and direct communication.  In the days of the intranet, chatter channels where the lecturer is also a member, work quite well.
  3. Have people in the building who speak the students’ first language and are sufficiently comfortable with other cultures to explain differences in expectations without provoking defensiveness.
  4. Be honest about the level of your school.  As a general rule of thumb, over-ambition kills a teaching initiative. We cannot do more than the skills of students allow.  We cannot do more than the equipment and libraries support.  The dumbing-down happens not when we get students to take the next step in their learning curve.  The dumbing-down happens when we define a highfaluting curriculum and have to pretend students are doing tasks that are way-over-their-heads.  This seems to be a fault of weaker schools who are trying to pretend they are something they are not.
  5. Identify the teaching unit.  I taught a 2 hour class in one school and contended with 20 emails a day on its administration.  On the whole it is better to let one person start and finish something.  If one person cannot manage course from beginning to end, break it up into two courses!  What you spend on lecturer costs, you will surely save on admin and managing misunderstandings.
  6. Keep the degree structure simple.   The more students are swirling around registering and deregistering, the more admin you have to do and the harder it is to relate to them as people.  When you have complicated systems, the school begins to be run by the admin staff and lecturers increasingly stop being teachers.

And also consider the absolute basics

When I arrive to take up a new appointment, these are the minimum and not very demanding facilities that I need to be effective.

  1. A clean desk and 10 hour rated chair, a bookshelf, a new internet-enabled computer, and a lockable filing cabinet in an office that I can work in quietly, tutor students and leave my personal possessions and half-written exam papers quite safely.
  2. A file with the regulations that pertain to the course.
  3. A clear map of the computer servers and any information that I might need.
  4. A visit from IT to set up any passwords that I might need.
  5. Students enrolled and present no later than 10% into the course.
  6. A list of any other resources I have (budget, printing press, photocopiers, etc.)
  7. Library access and an opportunity to tour the library.
  8. Any previously prescribed textbooks and material.
  9. A written brief on the culture of the school.  If it is not written down, then do not be surprised when we trip over it!
  10. If there is a course manual, have the material presented in one place.  What I don’t want to see an idiosyncratic syllabus with a “goals” for students, then a “text”, then questions and model answers, then another set of goals for the lecturer, then another set of suggestions for class.  This is nonsense.  The text is the model answer and the questions answered by the text are the questions.  One manual should do the trick.
  11. Examinations should have the same assessment process as the in-term assessment.  If the students will write essays in the exam, then the continuous assessment should be essays, etc.  The examination should reflect the skill we are assessing and that is what students should be practicing during the term and that is what the classes and textbook should model.  If students cannot make the step-up to the assessment within a month of the course beginning, then perhaps the course should be redesigned.  The following two months should be for a repeat cycle with fresh content but the same skill.  The last month should be for revision.

Paradoxically, in the olden days when people moved in and hung about for decades, these facilities might have been in place.  Now that ‘managers’ have speeded-up the churn, they can’t always keep up with the business model that they have put in place.

My list of 17 as a gift to you.

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    Productivity 2.0 vs Productivity 1.0

    Published January 3, 2010 by Jo Jordan

    HRM in the long recovery

    People are starting to look for ideas on how to manage HRM during the (long) recovery.  Here is my best hunch.   Once we have gone past keeping the firm positive, which I’ve written about quite extensively, then we have to go back to some basic strategic HRM.  You know, the ‘hard’ stuff.  What we make around here.  Who buys it.  Who makes it.  The numbers.

    Here are 4 questions to set you on the road to asking about HRM strategy.

    Productivity 2.0 vs Productivity 1.0

    Does the company work assembly-line style? Is its central idea that the world will deliver a steady stream of repetitive work that you will do exactly as you did yesterday?

    OR does the company work with a variety of demands, working with the customers to streamline what they want?

    Does the company rely on a few people to think up work processes which are designed and then handed over to staff to execute, no matter what feedback is received from the market?

    OR does the company center the work around feedback from the market?

    Of course, once you have answered these questions, you do need to figure out what to do next.  But if you are clear about these questions, you are well on the way to cutting out 80% of the muddle that we see in HR.

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    Your work personality: games-player or puppet-master?

    Published January 2, 2010 by Jo Jordan

    How fast will the 2010 be?

    We talk of the world becoming faster.  But in many ways, this pace is an illusion.  Try getting a decision out of someone!

    Will we be any better organized?

    There is a strata of the world that is not particularly accountable to any one.  Fads and fancies are adopted and dropped.

    Will we put into play the basics of organization?

    The issues of organization remain the same.

    • We need to have people “close up” who deal with fast cycle events and who thus don’t have the overall perspective.
    • We need people who operate one or two steps back from events who can collate and detect patterns.
    • And we need ways for these two groups to communicate.

    Will the internet help us implement the basics of good organization?

    What the internet allows us to do is to be both redundant and to communicate laterally with greater ease.

    Alternative reality games illustrate this principle.

    The plays contribute information “to the point of redundancy” so it is fine for any one person to dip-in-and-out at their pleasure.  Any one player is effectively redundant to the game.  As long as sufficient people are playing at any one time, the marginal value of the last player is redundant.

    We need the number and diversity of players that “kicks” the game into a phase state consistent with the 3D Lorenz butterfly.  No one as far as I know has studied the critical mass of players.  Nor has anyone studied how the lateral communication of the internet affects the number of people we need.  So far, people have just noted that the lateral communication allows us to treat individual contributions as marginally redundant.

    Interestingly, successful games have ‘puppet-masters’ in the background.  They’ve designed the game, they moderate the game, and they write up the game afterward.

    Will the internet change the tiered-nature of good organization?

    Alternate reality games have those familiar two layers: the day-to-day actors and the background ‘puppet-masters’.

    Where do you like to play: games-player or puppet-master?

    It’s a personal choice where we play.  We might also choose to play different parts at different times or on different games.

    Which is your preferred role?  Games player or puppet-master?

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    What do psychologists and HR managers contibute to a flourishing organization?

    Published January 2, 2010 by Jo Jordan

    A psychologist by any other name

    I belong to an odd profession. I am a psychologist, I specialize in work & organizations and in some jurisdictions I am called an occupational psychologist or an industrial psychologist or an industrial/organizational psychologist.  Sometimes I am called a business psychologist.

    I usually work for myself but we do our work at our clients.  So my office is my car, my laptop and my smartphone.  When we get to our clients we are likely to “check in” at the general managers’ suite.  As we are concerned with people, much of our work interweaves with HR management.

    So what do psychologists do?

    I like to phrase that differently.  What do we contribute to an organization which is flourishing?

    We have three tasks

    • To reduce the cost of management
    • To raise productivity and initiative
    • To pass on the benefits to the workforce

    Whether we deal with a big business or a neighborhood store, whether we work with government or an investment bank, our job is to reduce management cost, raise productivity and initiative and pass on the benefits to the workforce.

    It’s also our job to tell the story.  It is our job to say out loud what is happening, to hold up a mirror so that people can see themselves reducing the waste of management, enjoying their work more, and making more money.

    That’s what we do.

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    2010 and the age of networked manufacturing

    Published December 30, 2009 by Jo Jordan

    We can turn a plane on a dime

    The 787 flew ~ at last ~ 2.5 years late.

    The 787 was put together with a 20 page specification and takes 3 days to assemble parts from around the world rather than 40 days to assemble the plan manufactured on site.

    We can turn a plane on a dime.  And if we can manufacture a plane in a global network of local modules, then we can make anything.

    Is modularizing work a good thing ~ for us?

    Harvard Business Review blog are awed and skeptical in equal measure.

    • They are sure the world will copy the “lego” model.
    • They are sure that Chinese firms will give Boeing a run for their money.

    I too, am sure that Chinese firms will Boeing a run for their money.  They will give all of us a run for our money.  What interests me is who will win the race, and how this new race will change the future of work.

    Key skills in the future of workn

    Clearly there are key skills in this new form of work

    • Clicking the “lego” parts together
    • Negotiating the specification of the parts and adjusting for inevitable “drift” as parts are made
    • The credibility to organize the network of suppliers, customers and capital.

    It strikes me that clicking the parts together is not key.  Managing networks is the key.  A firm can be judged by the size of the global network that it can organize and manage profitably.

    Welcome to 2010 and the race to networking skills and managing global networks of local manufacturing modules!

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    Get a Career Director to stop you making rash job choices. Yes, even now.

    Published December 19, 2009 by Jo Jordan

    Hire a Career Director when you look for a job

    I once worked for a man who said you cannot Manage & Direct a project at the same time.  I didn’t really understand this statement, so I stored it away in the back-of-my-mind, to understand as time went by.

    Now I have a good example of what he means. You cannot sell and do business development at the same time.

    When you are looking for a job, you need a career coach to do your business development while you “sell” yourself.

    This is why.

    We need to separate execution from directorial oversight

    When we are selling things, the marketers open up a market for us, the business developers find the prospects, & the sales people close the sale.

    Once the sales process begins, the sales person will press on turning objections into opportunities. Quite rightly, because this is their job, sales people take the view that every sale is a good sale and they disregard every sign that they should walk away from the deal. In sales parlance, they counter sales objections. This is good selling, but dangerous business.

    The business development people have a watching brief during the sale and watch how the sale unfolds. Sometimes they simply have to step in and say, “No, we are sorry. That prospect and that deal looked good but it is time to walk away.”

    The Director/Manager distinction operates in the same way. The Manager executes and does everything to press on and solve problems. The Director watches from the sidelines and calculates the value of a project. Sometimes they too have to step in and say, “Yes, I know you can pull it off and complete the project, but it is not worth it. We have to pull the plug on the project but it is not a reflection on you. We were simply wrong about the value of the project and we must move on to something better.”

    We need Career Directors

    Whether we make our living as employees, freelancers or entrepreneurs, we have the same dilemma.

    We open up opportunities on many fronts. And we press on to a sale. We are keen to make a sale and we disregard warning signs that this is a bad deal.

    We need a mentor or coach to review the terms of “our sale”. We can try to do it ourselves but that is not reasonable. Psychologically we are in “close the sale” mode.

    Even if we mentally put a different hat on, walk to a different desk, and open a file that says business development, we will find it difficult to backtrack from action to analysis. Moreover, if we do succeed, we will find it very difficult move back to action. Analysing our own actions will take “the wind out of our sails” completely.

    At that moment, we want the deal and nothing else makes sense to us. Any friend who tries to give us any advice, is likely to get an earful!

    That is where a professional coach comes in. Most career coaches help you to “sell” yourself. Selling is important too! Get a selling coach as well.

    But you need a business development coach. You need someone to sit you down when you least want to and go through the details of the deal.

    • What you are emphasizing?
    • What are you missing?

    Choosing a Career Director

    You need someone who you will listen to. And it shouldn’t be someone with whom you have another relationship. You shouldn’t have a “dual relationship” as we say in the professions.

    The professionals in your life often have to give you bad news and you may want to shoot the messenger. Professionals understand that. As long as you pay your bill, you will be welcome back after you have calmed down. Professionals are there to save you hide while you go off and sell yourself!

    Framing your career search to avoid rash selling

    Until you get a professional business development coach, here are a few rules-of-thumb that people use to stop them getting too carried away with any deal.

    #1 Apply for 100 jobs, get 10 interviews and choose 1 job

    This is a good tactic when you don’t know the market well and you need to get out there and explore what is available.

    Focus on drawing a map and try to get 10 interview close in time to each other to give yourself a proper choice.

    #2 Apply for 500 jobs, get 5 interviews and choose 1 job

    Use this tactic when you are completely unknown in a market and you are building relationships.

    Focus on meeting people and understanding who knows whom. Concentrate on moving into a circle of people who are motivated to look after you.

    #3  Have 3 talks with other employers open and humming at any one time

    Use this tactic when you have a job that is OK and you can take your time. In this way you explore the 3 best opportunities at any time and explore them in depth yet never be rushed into a bad choice.

    #4  Send out 1 CV each & every month

    Use this tactic when you have a job that you like and expect to move one in a year or so. This tactic helps you keep your CV in order and your eye on the market. When you are ready to move, the shift into choosing a job will be more considered.

    #5  Deliberately plan to move employers every 2 to 3 years

    See every job as a “project” within your career and work out how this job will lead you to the next job. What must happen in this job to allow you to move to the next one? Which of 10 organizations will be supplying the job after this!

    This tactic will focus your mind on the essential features of the job that you must get right (for you).

    Career Direction and Unemployment

    If you have been a victim of the recession, restoring positive cash flow is probably urgent for you.  you may be feeling impatient. If you read this far in that frame of mind, well done!

    Appreciate though, that the pressure of cash may lead you to make a bad decision. You definitely need a Career Director.  A Career Director will also share the burden of navigating the current job market will also make life considerably easier for you. Think about it!

    How has the recession changed job searches?

    I’ll leave you with these questions

    How do you manage your job search? Do you have a career coach whose job it is to make sure you make a wise decision? Do you have a attention-management strategy that I can add to the ones above?

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    Be prepared! Tips for driving in snow?

    Published December 17, 2009 by Jo Jordan

    Were you a Brownie, Cub, Scout or Guide?

    As a girl, I was a ‘Brownie’.  I love the “Be Prepared’ part.  I like thinking up a plan and making it happen.

    It’s snowing in UK

    This morning I set off for London knowing that snow was expected.  I left London earlier than usual and found I rather like driving in snow.   Cars slow down and observe a decent stopping distance!

    And I had prepares, a little.  I had a sleeping bag and a flask of hot water just in case!

    What are the tricks of driving in light snow?

    But what I hadn’t expected was losing my brakes.  A car in front of me slowed down and I tried to as well.  Aha!  Judder judder.  Nothing but judder.

    I pumped the brakes thinking I could dislodge some ice.  Nothing happened.  I just closed on the car in the front of me.

    So I hastily started to change down (we have manual shifts here) and looked left and right to pick a snow bank to skid into if the gears didn’t slow me down.

    I did slow down, thankfully. And this happened again several times.

    So much for being prepared!  I realized that I know nothing about driving in snow.  I need to find out!

    Competence matters in this world.  It really does!

    PS  I took 1 hour 50 minutes to get back in snow driving most of the way at 25 miles an hour.  Going down to London in fine weather this morning took 2 hours 15 minutes much of it at 5 miles an hour.   Snow has led to efficiency!  I just need to develop a good mental model of safe driving.

    Any tips?

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    Where is the bottle neck in your career? Worship that!

    Published December 15, 2009 by Jo Jordan

    Do you remember the Theory of Constraints?

    A system is only as good as its slowest part!

    And because slow sections are a fact of life, we rally around the slow section part, not the fastest part, or the most talented!

    Basically, the slowly part must never be left with nothing to do!

    A faster section needs to be standing by to deliver their work just as they need it.  No sooner – there is no point as they cannot do it.  And no later because their downtime will hold everyone back.

    We also need a signal to tell us that slow section is nearly finished what they are doing, and the signal should arrive just in time for the buffer to release the next lot of work.  Again there is no point in sending it sooner because they cannot do it and while work sits around, it costs us money.

    So we won’t start our piece until we are reasonably confident that the slow section can receive it!  Remembering that they will sometimes take longer and sometimes take a shorter time, we must be ready to change our plans accordingly.

    There are a lot of practical applications for the Theory of Constraints

    • Put the slowest child in the front of the line not at the back.  Everyone has to walk behind lest they leave the child behind completely!
    • Add resources to the slowest part of work until they are the slowest part no more!  And then work with the new slowest part.
    • Don’t bother to take on more work than the slowest part can do.  It cannot be completed no matter how hard others work.
    • And of course never be the slowest unit in a team because you will have to work non-stop while others watch you!

    The Theory of Constraints and your Career

    Tell me, where are the critical links in your career?  Where is the point through which everything else flows at least once?

    Where is the point which holds everything else up?

    Now focus on that point, and get it as efficient as you can.  Don’t hurry it and create a long “to do” list.  It does not help the work speed up.

    Just find a way to make it more efficient and effective.

    Rinse and repeat.

    P.S.  Theory of Constraints is not inconsistent with a strengths based approach to psychology.  When we focus on what the slowest part does well and do more of it, the system runs better.  When we treat the slowest part as a nuisance and start harassing it with a back load of work – do this, do that! – then it will just get slower and the system slows down more.  Look at the strengths of the slowest part and we will all get along a lot quicker.   Quick people?  Wait.  We can’t go faster than our slowest teammate but we can have what they need at their finger tips just when they need it!

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    Multiplicator effects – key to the economy, key to our business success

    Published December 14, 2009 by Jo Jordan

    Multiplicator effect

    I sat down this morning to ponder the multiplicater effect and what it tells us about management in the new age of knowledge and information.

    This is how I look at it.

    In the 1900’s

    In the olden days, business was like a household budget. Money came in and money went out.

    The way to get a bit richer was to take the job you did and get someone to do parts of it more cheaply than you could do yourself.

    Let’s imagine I was a cobbler. If I could get you to stand in a line and one of you put on the soles, one thread the laces, and so on.  I could pay you each less than I could pay myself. And I could keep the profit that each would make if he worked for himself.

    We used simple arithmetic and success was mainly about keeping the change.

    Confusing housekeeping with economics

    This business model leads to weird behaviour. Everyone believes that a one pound coin is indivisible. Either I have it, or you have it. And we fight to the death over it.

    National wealth does not work like that. Indeed, company wealth doesn’t work like that.

    Stock turn is important in shops. I don’t want to buy stock and having it sit on the shelves. I want it in and I want it out and the money banked. Circulation is the key. Not hoarding.

    In a town, the same applies. When we fight over the one pound coin, we are wasting time and energy. Let me buy something from you with the coin. Then let you buy something from the next person and they from the next and ultimately someone buys from me. That one pound serves many of us. The more people served by the same one pound coin, the healthier the economy.

    Installation art

    I keep threatening to put an GPS device in a pound coin to follow it as it moves in the wild. If you would like to collaborate in that project, do get in touch.

    In the 2000’s

    In the modern business world, few of us are like the cobbler with a skill which can be broken into parts, each of which can be done by someone less skilled than us for less money than we would do it ourselves.

    Adam Smith and the division of labor

    In this day and age, that model of division of labour is a nonsense. Yes, it made perfect sense in the 1800 hundreds in Scotland when Adam Smith said that we can make more pins when we each made part of the pin. And maybe this rule-of-thumb is still true when we are making pins.

    Today’s products are more complicated than pins

    But in today’s world, we are often making something a lot more complicated than a pin. We’ve moved on. There isn’t any one person who has made the whole of what we are making. There isn’t any person who knows how to do everything. In truth, if we put a 1000 elves in with Santa we wouldn’t be able to draw or visualize exactly what we are making

    We are like the blind men describing the elephant. I think the elephant is his trunk. You think it is his tail.

    The elephant knows he is an elephant, of course. But he has no way of communicating with the blind men We have to wait until the blind men get the concept of a possible elephant and start communicating with each other. Then they can work out there is an elephant and what it looks like.

    You cannot fool all of the people all of the time but there is no end to the people who will try

    Now there are plenty of people out there trying to pretend that they know how to make a pin and hoping to delegate part of it to you. Notice well though, that they will be reluctant to give you a good contract that goes beyond chance.   They have no market for that pin. (Sorry people who make real pins ~ I know you are real.)

    Before you part with an hour of your time, ask them for their sales report

    The point is not that the heaven has finally fallen on Chicken Licken. The point is that the world is making bigger things than pins. When you hear someone claim that they understand the whole elephant and you should play a small part at the trunk for a pittance, ask sweetly to see the sales reports. They won’t show the report to you because it doesn’t exist.

    Listen to those who want genuinely to collaborate

    But when someone says, hey, I feel something interesting in front of me. What do you feel? Do you think there is any connection between what you feel and I feel? THEN, we have a show.

    When we network our skills together, then we can make something that we cannot see alone.

    This is not the age of division of labor

    Division of labour aimed to do things faster and cheaper. Today’s world is about networking specialist labour to do something no one person or company can do alone.

    This is the age of connecting with other skilled people

    This is not the age of division of labour and making smaller and smaller things. This is the age of networking skill and making bigger and bigger things.

    To be practical

    As a career coach and work psychologist, I put my practical cap on and ask: what does this mean in practice?

    • The essential career tool of today is a set of modular pieces of work which have the potential to link up with others. I say potential because other people may not have work ready to link up.  We do our work anyway but rather than just do it, we do it in a way that has potential to link up with others so they can see where they could join in.
    • The essential career management tool of today is to be adaptable and do whatever work is available without losing sight of our skill base. The test of any task is not whether we are paid for it but whether we are willing to put it on our website for others to link up to.
    • The essential selection criteria for inclusion in a permanent team will be
      • number of modules we have available for others to use
      • the diversity of modules (are we able to clean the floor and do the accounts as readily as paint a Picasso)
      • the readiness at which we create modules in new situations (rate and diversity)
      • the connections we make with the team and importantly are now possible between other team members without our presence!
    • The ethics of selection come down to whether a person’s connections will be richer by working with us (do they become more creative and are they involved in richer sets of connections?)
    • Pay is likely to be more equal with money paid into development funds to pay for capital when it is needed and the opening up new opportunities. Where there are differentials they are likely to come from being central to a network because the pound moves through us more often (we buy and we sell). People who only sell should receive less.
    • Ranks of professions might change. Lets imagine we paid a toll to a receptionist each time we walked through the door. We might be come reluctant to have a receptionist. Indeed, this is a test of a division of labour philosophy operating. We may not need the service if we had to pay more for it. Let’s imagine the hospital workers mentioned in a paper today who create a lot more value than they take home. What if they decided to run a hospital and just hire the doctors and nurses around them. That makes sort of sense to me!
    • In the olden days, training meant starting with a small task and growing into the ‘owner’. Obviously the tasks in our early career will be small.  But what if the goal was to move increasingly into the centre of a network where we are able to work with a wider number of people?  Have the pound coin pass through us more often? What if the goal was to increase whom we are able to work with on a project of value?  What if I took a person into a room and said: take two people, figure out what they can do and figure out, not what you can sell to each of them, but what you can take/buy from one, transform and pass on to the next. It’s what entrepreneurs do, of course. But what if the entire training process was geared to the capacity to detect and executive collaboration?
    • Jane McGonigle lists the qualities of projects that have this magical capacity which I restated here I would look for these multiplicator competencies in someone’s portfolio and help them find opportunities to broaden their experience in new ways of working.

    The beginning is the ability to do modular work that has capacity for collaboration. To be potentiated, so to speak, to collaborate. A change of focus but an important one. Learn to be a multiplier rather than a taker.

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    Are we done ‘bargaining’ about the financial crisis? I wish, but I don’t think so.

    Published December 14, 2009 by Jo Jordan

    Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, action & the financial crisis

    This time last year we were definitely in the first of the five stages of grief.  Denial: we couldn’t quite believe that the bankers had blown a hole below our a waterline.

    A year later, economists at least, have moved on.

    The Governor of the Bank of England said

    The sheer scale of support to the banking sector is breathtaking. In the UK, in the form of direct or guaranteed loans and equity investment, it is not far short of a trillion (that is, one thousand billion) pounds, close to two-thirds of the annual output of the entire economy.

    To paraphrase a great wartime leader, never in the field of financial endeavour has so much money been owed by so few to so many. And, one might add, so far with little real reform.” (Governor of the Bank of England, in a speech, 20 October, 2009. )

    Yes.  One trillion pounds sterling, 66% of the UK’s annual GDP of 1,4 trillion pounds has been put aside to mend the hole, lest it sinks the entire ship of state.

    I don’t think the man and woman in the street quite grasps the size of the hole.  If they did, they would have stormed thelife-boats.

    Professional economist are beginning to look at alternatives

    The economists are beginning to debate seriously though.

    Do we cut back hard to pay down our national debt – for which you and I must read – government debt?  Should the government stop spending like we might when we’ve just had an overseas holiday and put too much on the credit card?  Cut out all the luxuries till we have paid off our excesses?

    Or do we need Keynesian economics to get out of this?  That is, should we spend money from the center to create a ripple effect?  For example, should the government spends 100 pounds on a new school, who pays the builder who pays the suppliers and who pays their suppliers who pay the supermarkets and who ultimately pays me.  All of us take part and we all pay tax and don’t claim benefits?

    Ann Pettifor’s talk on Keynesian economics is 20 pages long.  If you are not an economist, put aside a couple of hours to get through it. It is worth the time.  First, it is clearly written.  You will understand the issues. Second, it is well written. It is nice to know that someone in England can still write a great speech (though she appears to live and work out of the States now).

    Where are economists on the grief cycle?

    So the economists are beginning to look at the facts.  What stage of grief are they in?  We need to know this so that we have a sense of how long the dilly-dallying will go on.

    • None are really proposing action.  The actions of others, yes, but not their own.  But they are along the track.  I would say the independent economists are around the bargaining stage – if we do this, it will be alright!
    • The Governor of the Bank of England, though admirably witty, seems to be further along around the depression stage. I do hate writing that.  It feels like tempting fate.  It’s relevance is this. It’s important to have a sense of when we will move collectively out of the state of shock and deliberation.  And it is important for younger psychologists reading this to store away a sense of how long community’s take to recover psychologically from extreme shocks so they are better able to lead when shocks happen in the future as they surely will.

    We are gathering ourselves for action

    We are still waiting for the leaders whose plans are not contingent.  We are still waiting for the leaders who say this is what I am going to do. This is what I am wholly committed to doing ~ so much so that I don’t have to say I am committed.  You see it in my eyes. You see it in my focused attention.  You see it in my invitation to join me.

    We have a way to go.

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