Aug 09
0

Robots don’t have childhoods

By | Business, Theology | 2 Comments

I’m sitting on the beach at North Berwick, with clear views out to the Bass Rock and May Isle, watching the children play. My daughter digs a deep hole, then runs off to find hermit crabs in the rock pools. Nearby, a young boy is buried up to the neck while his sister decorates his sarcophagus with shells. On the shore, a toddler stands transfixed by a washed-up jellyfish, while two older girls struggle to manipulate a boat in the shallows, trying to avoid the splashing boys playing swim-tig.

We’re under the benign shadow of the North Berwick Law, where there’s a bronze-age hill fort, so it’s likely this holiday postcard scene has not changed much since this part of Scotland was first settled, thousands of years ago, when those children dug holes, found crabs, and frolicked in the sea. I felt a wave of such sadness, thinking forward in time. Will this beach still play host to the children of the far distant future, or will we have designed out childhood by then? Robots don’t have childhoods because they don’t need them. Humans still do, but I wonder how much time you’ve spent trying to figure out why?

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May 27
4

A Year of Universal Basic Income?

By | Business, Theology | 4 Comments

Following the first cases of Covid-19 in the UK in January and February, lockdown was announced on the evening on Monday 23 March. Since then, citizens have been working from home, except for keyworkers, or have been laid off or furloughed under the government’s Job Retention Scheme. As at 12 May, 7.5 million jobs have been furloughed, and the British Chamber of Commerce reported that 71% of businesses surveyed by them had furloughed some staff. This means that the UK government are currently paying the wage bill for about a quarter of all UK employees. The scheme will be gradually phased out, with some part-time working and employer contributions, finally ending in October.

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Aug 07
5

How to Budge Up

By | Business | 2 Comments

The head-hunter Joanna Moriarty has a wonderful turn of phrase. She says it’s great that men are appointing women to senior roles, but now that women have finally made it into the boardroom, she reckons the men still need to ‘budge up’ to accommodate them. I know quite a few men who struggle with this, because it seems that whatever they do it’s never quite right. It either feels patronising, or it’s not supportive enough. And it’s in everyone’s interests that women perform well, particularly in the boardroom, not just in service of better results but also to be role models for those coming up behind them. So how might men budge up, exactly? Here are 7 golden rules:

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May 31
0

Character and Confidence

By | Business | No Comments

The FT’s Sarah O’Connor unleashed a bit of a storm when she wrote recently that teaching state-school kids firm handshakes was patronising, and that ‘character education’ had no place in the national curriculum. I should like to contest this both as the Chairman of Gordonstoun school, which invented character education, and as a state-school educated Scot who was lucky enough to attend Lucie Clayton Finishing School in Kensington one summer. Read More

Dec 10
0

Be more unicorn

By | Business | No Comments

You can’t avoid the unicorns, if you go into any gift shop these days. They’re everywhere – key-rings, handbags, fairy-lights; you can even buy sequinned t-shirts that say ‘be more unicorn’ on the front. It’s funny how much appeal this mythical beast has.

In Scotland, where it’s the national animal, Stirling Castle has gone unicorn-mad. In the Queen’s Inner Hall, you’ll find seven hand-woven unicorn tapestries hanging on the walls. They’re based on the famous Hunt of the Unicorn series from the 1500s, which are now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Re-creating them in Stirling was quite a project, costing £2million and taking 13 years. The panels show a unicorn being hunted, tamed by a virgin, killed, then appearing alive again in captivity. This narrative is assumed to be an allegorical interpretation of the life of Christ, although no-one really knows what’s going on in this story. Read More

Aug 20
0

How to design in character education

By | Business | No Comments

Extreme Performance

Among adults, one of the most common phobias is public speaking. Well, it seems that Gordonstoun could teach us a thing or two about how to fix that. When our Head of Music first heard the results of research into the value of our out-of-classroom offer, he responded by mounting weekly recitals. Struck by the compelling pedagogy of challenge, he realised that the students needed more than just the once-termly terror of a public concert if they were really to embed public performance skills. And what could be more terrifying that standing in the loneliness of a concert hall surrounded by your peers, waiting to play?
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Jan 07
0

For the sake of honour

By | Business, Theology | One Comment

Honour is one of those words that gets bandied about rather a lot. Sometimes it’s used just as a label, as in the Honours of Scotland; ‘it wasn’t me, Your Honour’; and ‘she gave him a gong in the Honours’. We also talk about ‘honour’ killings, as well as Honorary degrees. But what does it mean when we say things like: ‘I’m honoured to meet you;’ ‘I promise on my honour;’ or even ‘wilt thou love her, comfort her, honour, and keep her?’ These usages seems to invoke a sense of respect and virtue, something that is more about an orientation or a behaviour.

Honour is one of those old-fashioned words, like manners. But when we use it of someone, we refer to that rather rare and durable characteristic of their being reliably moral. We think people are honourable if they do the right thing. We tend to notice it all the more if it proves costly: our mental picture is probably of a tweedy and stoic English gent standing on a lonely pier, waving goodbye to his true love because she deserves better. So is honour as outdated as curtsying to cakes, and should we have none of it? On the contrary, we need honour more than ever, and we need to start teaching it to our children again. Read More

Sep 30
1

30 days hath September…

By | Business | One Comment

30 days hath September,

April, June and November,

All the rest have 31,

Excepting February alone.

Which has but 28 days clear

And 29 in each leap year.

I was at school with a leap year baby. She had to make her own birthday badges with the quarters written in each year. When we hit 18, we used to tell the barman not to serve her, because she was only 5 and a half.

And time is a funny thing. It’s all relative, says Einstein. It certainly is if you live on Mercury, where a bad day at the office would actually last 2 earth years. Even here, noon differs. Today in Inverness high noon is due at 1306 hrs, a full 16 minutes after high noon in London. So when Big Ben does chime, he’s actually fast. That’s one of the reasons we need the radio, to keep us all in time. Every train station used to use its own local time, so you can imagine the chaos before they introduced Railway Time in 1840, base-lined on Greenwich.

We like to imagine time is a constant, because we like to imagine we can manage time. But of course we can’t, we can only ever manage ourselves. The clock will tick on, whether we ‘waste’ time or ‘spend’ it wisely. The average person will use up 25 years of their life sleeping, which has already wiped out quite a lot of your allotted span.

What will you do with the rest of it? Graveyards are full of messages from the dead to the living about that: Tempus Fugit – time flies – or Carpe Diem – seize the day. It’s so easy to feel in a rush. If only I had more time! I’m so busy! But when I relax a little about time, and notice its quixotic personality, I can enjoy the time passing a little more. That’s another poem I learned at school: What is this life if full of care we have no time to stand and stare?

And perhaps none of us really need to be in quite such a hurry. After all, oak trees in the forest don’t usually produce acorns until they are 50 years old. We may yet still have all the time in the world…

Aug 05
1

Managing Risk: by Spreadsheet or Emotion?

By | Business | No Comments

Ethics is often seen to be a luxury, or a nice-to-have; if deployed suitably publicly, it might enhance an organisation’s licence to operate, or give their brand a virtuous glow. The business case for ethics is, however, less cynical and more strategic: it’s not so much about brand personality than it is about risk.

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Jun 24
0

Is it worth being a nasty boss?

By | Business | No Comments

This week I was struck by a piece in the FT arguing that “nasty leaders can be successful – if they don’t cross the line.’ The piece described some bullies who had seemingly produced excellent results, and who were not as unpopular as their behaviour might suggest. The article was careful not to suggest bullying as a strategy, of course, but the subtext is clear. If you get results, you can usually ‘get away’ with bad behaviour.

And we know this to be true, because we see it every day in our organisations, both public and private, and in politics as much as in the professions. But before you nod sadly and move swiftly on, please stop for a moment. You are being had. This is classic ‘end justifies the means’ morality, and we are so used to it as the prevailing ethical narrative that it seems irrefutable and unremarkable. Read More

Apr 09
4

Diogenes Small, RIP

By | Business, Theology | No Comments

I discovered how easy it is to get a book dedicated to you when I was about 13. All you have to do is ​gather your sisters, and gang up on ​his best mate at ​your grandfather’s funeral. And hey presto, The Secret of Annex 3, by Colin Dexter, for Elizabeth, Anna and Eve. Read More