Author: bloggulentgreytripe

I met with my university’s ‘expert’ in Social Media this week and chatted about its rise and rise within society and inevitably within courses such as our MBA. She has the considerable challenge of engaging with academic staff to help them develop use of social media tools, both personally and within teaching activity. There is…

We want happy people in a Big Society. We want excellent schools. We want, we want… Who wants to be happy in actual fact? Do we really want excellence in an inane grinning fashion? There is something dreadful about ‘being happy and excellent’. It’s all too artificial. Some politicians’ suggestions that teachers are ‘put upon’…

Cities are divided places; railways, canals, bridges and barriered ring-roads dissect communities allowing commerce to accelerate unhindered. A post-industrial patchwork has left isolated zones known now by their economic and social characteristics. Some areas are what Frederic M. Thrasher called ‘delinquency areas’. Bits of ‘turf’ where seeping damp of deprivation sits opposite red chino’d deli-land. Cafe Society cranes up at high-rise poverty…

‘Toothless poodle’ is a rather harsh phrase. But ‘poodling’ is frequent mockery for those bodies set up to protect us from wanton hacks or country leaders currying-favour with allies. Glistening in the sun what do our cherished structures serve? Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak hit the nail incredibly hard last year. She wrote a fizzing critique which keeps…

Three things hit home from chatting to family and friends this week: !) The home is precious and becoming a luxury few can afford !) Lack of housing stock is a Social Catastrophe not being addressed !) Inequality is now demarked by ‘living space’ Growing up by the sea I love space, endless horizons, being…

The appeal of stream of consciousness writers like Faulkner, Joyce and then Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway appears to be that they removed us from the tyranny of clock time. “Clocks slay time. Time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.”  The…

Sitting in Pitlochry’s Festival Theatre today (after seeing My Fair Lady last night) having coffee with Luke and reading The Scotsman; was treated to a sparkling interview with John Berger in the centre supplement.  Berger is like Michael Polanyi. One of those hugely influential writers to a generation of readers but who, for some reason,…

Or to be precise 12 Angry Men, one of the finest Hollywood offerings – the 1957 version of course; and the outstanding Lee J Cobb, whose character (Juror No. 3) explodes his way to the film’s denouement: “You lousy bunch of bleeding hearts!” Yes simplistic but nevertheless revealing that our most powerful driver of change…

This is a cute little snippet in today’s rag. “When I interviewed Daunt in 2006 he told me that he was wary of what he called “the Waterstone’s brick wall” – when a company reaches the size at which systems and processes overtake passion and instinct. This, he said, is why he has deliberately kept…

My first visit up to the ‘all seeing’ Castle Hill in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, yesterday with Mark to shoot a video introduction to an international variant of one of our MBA modules, but this doubled nicely as a video blog on my current research. Particularly keen to share thoughts on the nature of slow change and…