Latest Posts
Book Review: Flow, The Psychology of Optimal Experience
Today’s book review is Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. I first came across the concept of Flow in my previous job, where it was presented to us as a concept that will help you manage people better – that you should try and manage people soContinue Reading
The Rules
There was a story last week about how the new government has issued a directive that major statutory agencies (for example the CSIRO, ANSTO and Questacon) will not issue any “strategic media releases which relate to the Government’s key messages” unless they have been vetted by the government – specifically theContinue Reading
Book Review: Strategy and the Fat Smoker
Today’s book review is Strategy and the Fat Smoker; Doing What’s Obvious But Not Easy, by David Maister. First, a disclosure. In a first for me, I got this book as an advance copy for review on my blog. And given that David Maister has been one of my favouriteContinue Reading
The holiday season
Mark Bahnisch in Larvatus Prodeo has a post celebrating the start of the festive season (for political junkies, who had to get the election out of the way before they even noticed that the decorations were up in October). In passing, he comments that: it’s interesting to note, just quietly,Continue Reading
Sydney – Public Spaces Public Life
The City of Sydney recently engaged “international urban design expert Jan Gehl” to perform a “public spaces public life” study on Sydney with the aim of reviewing how people use the city of Sydney, living, working, playing, and make some recommendations as to how to improve it. He reported toContinue Reading
Actuaries as ostriches
The Institute of Actuaries of Australia does a quick (36 seconds is the promise) survey of its members once a month, reported in its imaginatively titled magazine Actuary Australia. Of the 345 respondents (self selected, but a good proportion of all the actuaries in Australia) 35% don’t believe that globalContinue Reading
Election geeks
We had a small party at our place for the election last night. I realised how well I’d chosen the guest list when the people that didn’t know each other started comparing notes on how much they loved Antony Green. This was the preparation I did for the evening: TheContinue Reading
Book Review: the Death and Life of Great American Cities
Today’s review is The Death and Life of Great American Cities, by Jane Jacobs. This is a book I never would have read without my blogging habit. When she died last year, several of my favourite bloggers wrote about her. The book is an indictment of pretty much everything aboutContinue Reading
Interest rates
A friend of mine pointed out to me (you really should get your own blog, Brian!) that the discussion of who is a better economic manager by reference to absolute levels of interest rates misses some fairly fundamental points about how much is inside the control of the people managingContinue Reading
Jury again
One of the reasons (apart from general laziness) that I didn’t do Globlopomo is that I was called for Jury service for a month starting today. But I’m posting now because I got off. I got as far as sitting in the jury box of a trial of someone for sexualContinue Reading