Author: bloggulentgreytripe

Global management is falling in love with the prospect of big data as its latest ‘third-dimension’. Its scale is a possible route through the maze of business planning. But what if you combine empathy, which, fundamentally, is the ability to imagine, with the interpretation of big data? More so is the real third-dimension primarily found…

James Joyce summed up Brexiteers: “The whole Anglo-Saxon spirit… the manly independence, the unconscious cruelty, the persistence, the slow yet efficient intelligence, the sexual apathy, the calculating taciturnity.” Which I’ll come on to. But firstly, my car. It slid down a snow-covered Yorkshire hillside recently, saved only by a convenient wall. Neatly scarring both left-side passenger…

Questioning power doesn’t get any easier. At least not in the Age of Kittens and other cuteness. The trauma of speaking is still with us. Hearing one’s own voice can hurt. Richard Rorty says this concern or hesitation is a form of irony. As we open our mouths we are wracked with the thought that…

Published originally in: The Conversation: https://theconversation.com/is-it-really-so-bad-to-have-a-business-mogul-as-president-68265 Donald Trump’s image as a street fighter offering a voice to the disenfranchised propelled him to victory in the US election. But beyond the artifice of political stage management, it just might be possible that an executive business brain will cut through Washington’s House of Cards. Trump has never…

What would the builder from Nazareth think about Christianity? Would he be a Christian? Nazareth was not even a one horse town by the way. So whatever you think of the present state of Christianity its rise from Hicksville to global is intriguing. Somebody said the other day Jesus was a Sophist, with the gift…

It’s 11p.m. After a long-shift at the office a woman presses the up-button to summon the multi-storey car park elevator. Her car is on Floor 12. The lift-doors crank open. Four males, beer cans in hand refuse to move. Does she step in? Now, students of organisational behaviour are meant to know this stuff. Folks in…

Playfulness in language as a notion hovers alongside the conventional informational telling of Western social-history. Where our fact-based education teaches us to learn time events, and believe this was ‘us’, turning to consider ‘the way we express’ our world offers potential. The history of the modern literature canon is a story of playfulness, or its…

**Reflections on poet Norman Nicholson, born Millom 1914** ‘Have you been to London? My grandmother asked. ‘No.’ China dogs on the mantelshelf, Paper blinds at the window, Three generations simmering on the bright black lead, And a kettle filled to the neb, Spilled over long ago. The constant tension within the English spirit is between its…

Answers on a postcard please. Modernity might have ‘started’ when the ploughboy opened his  double-entry bookkeeping system?  Or when pints replaced flagons. Or Henry the VIII asked for ‘pastrami-triple-deck-on-rye-no-butter-no-olives-with-double-decaff-skinny-latte-soy-no-sugar’? A concept still difficult at most British cafés! Although if Kolakowski’s right, no person can conceive of the Age they are in. So, if you’re praising…