Separated by a common language

We are used to language and geography indicating cultural differences, and it’s easy to forget that cultural differences exist just fine even when linguistic and geographical boundaries are removed.  There’s a shock of surprise when people whose entirely understandable words are only a click away turn out to have different assumptions, different beliefs, different attitudes and different cultural references.

One of the things that’s still cool about the web is that it gives us un-mediated access to other people.  Quite literally so.  It lets us find other people’s words without filtering them through TV or Film or News or any other medium.  Simply clicking around WordPress here gives me access to all sorts of people with all sorts of attitudes and all sorts of beliefs. But because they write in English, it’s all to easy for me to assume that we have far more in common than in fact we do.  It’s only when I read what they have say that I realise that one of us is barking. The apparent transparency of the internet shows us just how culturally fractured the English-speaking world actually is, but we have to be paying attention to notice it.

The Son of Roj Blake commented on how easy it is for cultural references to just whizz past in his remarks about the opening credits of The Watchmen:

how many 18 year olds (or anyone, for that matter) would recognise or be able to explain the significance of (in order):
- the Enola Gay at 0:51
- the subversion of an iconic photo from Times Square at 1:11 (in our universe, that nurse was kissed by a sailor, and the photo made the cover of Time magazine. You can see the sailor in the background…)
- would they know who the guy shaking Dr. Manhattan’s hand at 2:28 is? Would they recognise his wife on the left?…

He’s right: those references are accessible and inaccessible at the same time. They are accessible because it is a globally released English-language film and they are inaccessible because they are culturally specific to one nation and one generation. I finally understand the point that George Bernard Shaw was making when he said: ‘England and America are two nations separated by a common language’.

This separation is invidious because we don’t expect it.  We try harder when there are linguistic barriers because we actively expect differences in attitudes and beliefs and cultural references and we cut some slack accordingly or make an effort to bridge the gap.  As Obelix says so often in the Asterix books:

These Germans / British / Spanish / Romans are crazy…

Take those linguistic barriers away and all sorts of odd things happen.  We can miss cultural references without even knowing we are missing them as SoRB observed with the Watchmen trailer. But we assume a greater similarity than there is, which is one of the reasons that Sarah Palin seemed unreal to Britons, like some kind of bizzare caricature.  She was almost impossible for us to understand: we had no concrete cultural references for her. If her foreignness had been signalled by a foreign language we might have recognised the cultural differences for what they were.  We would have realised that she was real and not some engineered cross between Barbie and Lara Croft.

As with so many things, Douglas Adams put his finger deftly on it when he described that instantaneous and universal translator the Babel fish:

Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.
The Hitch Hikers’ Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams.

I’m still thinking this whole thing through, but the long and the short of it is that the world is a whole lot more multi-faceted and culturally fractured than we think.  The internet appears to break down barriers and boundaries, but in fact as any comments thread on YouTube shows us those barriers and boundaries are alive and well.

Tap Tap

I was taught to type at school on an Imperial with painted out keys. As a result I can touch-type, though I am nowhere near as accurate as I used to be. It can be fun though: if someone interrupts me when I’m on a roll, I find myself gazing politely at them while we talk and typing at 60-65 wpm. It disconcerts them for some reason. Can’t think why.

There is a downside though. Because I learned to type on a typewriter my thumb goes tap-tap on the space-bar immediately after my right ring finger hits the full stop.(tap-tap) In those dim and distant days we were taught to put a double space after a full stop, and try as I might, my thumb still does.(tap-tap)

Most of the time this isn’t a problem.(tap-tap) Word-processing programmes were developed for typists, and can cope with the double-space.(tap-tap) Web pages are different.(tap-tap) WordPress handles the double-space particularly badly, frequently splitting them and putting one of them at the start of a line and messing up the left justification.(tap-tap)

This annoys me.(tap-tap).

Considerably.(tap-tap).

And there isn’t even a decent find-and-replace feature in WP.(tap-tap). If I want rid of those pesky double-spaces I have to copy and paste into Notepad from the HTML editor and then search and replace to get rid of them.(tap-tap) Not a big deal, but annoying nonetheless.(tap-tap) And unfortunately that clunky work-around is massively easier than getting my thumb to change the habit of over half a lifetime.

Tap-tappy-tap-tap… TAP TAP.

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Selling collaboration services within an organisation

Selling collaboration services and development services within an organization? – Art Gelwicks recently posted this as a question in the SharePoint Users Group on LinkedIn, and I found myself writing more than would fit in a discussion forum. So here it is.

Are you selling ‘bottom up’ by putting SharePoint out there and letting people use it spontaneously, or are you selling ‘top down’ by finding a sponsor with a requirement and using SharePoint to fulfil it?

There are pros and cons to both. The keys to working out these pros and cons for your organisation are

• culture
• use cases and
• champions

Culture

How your organisation takes to SharePoint depends in part on the culture. Some cultures are enthusiastic about collaboration tools like Instant Messaging, Live Meeting and SharePoint, and others see these sorts of tools as time-wasters. Here’s how to work out which one yours is.

Goffee and Jones do a great 2×2 for the culture of an organisation. They say that the glue that enables a team (department, company) to work together is either sociability or solidarity; organisations with high sociability scores are ‘networked’ and organisations with high solidarity scores are ‘mercenary’. There’s more to it than that, their book is very readable and includes diagnostic tools.

I have seen people in departments where the glue has been sociability take well to the collaborative features of SharePoint like discussion forums, alerts, review workflows and MySites. I’ve not tested this, but if your organisation is networked (and read Goffee and Jones to decide if it is) then a bottom up approach would probably work well. Look out to see whether the people are already comfortable with tools like Instant Messaging and LiveMeeting, whether they are active on Twitter, LinkedIn and FaceBook, and whether Monday mornings start with a chat about the weekend. This isn’t about people who are early adopters of technology, it’s about people who like technology because it is a social and work enabler.

By contrast I have seen people in ‘mercenary’ organisations who are so busily focussed on deliver-deliver-deliver that they don’t have time to ‘waste’ learning how to use a new tool like SharePoint. In an organisation that’s mercenary (again read Goffee and Jones – they mean it in a particular way) you need a sponsor and a project. Work out what your sponsor’s driver is and fulfil it. They may want to cut down storage costs, or improve a specific set of working practices, or control the published versions of training material.

Find a sponsor with a specific need and fulfil that need.

Rinse and repeat.

This brings us on to:

Use Cases

One of the problems with SharePoint is that it’s a swiss army knife of a tool – useful for such a large number of things that it’s hard to stay focused on just one or two. In a ‘mercenary’ organisation the problem is handled for you – your sponsor has a specific task and you focus on that. The challenge is in the ‘networked’ organisations where everyone who comes across SharePoint wants to play with it all, now, as soon as possible, shiny, shiny, new, cool.

Rolling out the whole of SharePoint across the whole of the organisation is a distraction for them and a management nightmare for you. You need to identify a single use-case, but it is much harder because there isn’t a single obvious business requirement and there may not be a single sponsor. Worse, you may have a sponsor who has a vague vision like ‘collaboration’ or an unrealistic one like ‘getting everyone to use their My Site like an internal FaceBook profile’.

If you are going bottom-up you need to roll out solutions to one or a maximum of two use-cases at a time. To find out which one, put together a survey and ask what stops people collaborating well right now. Word it terms of how they work, not in terms of the SharePoint features so:

• full mail-boxes – not – emailing urls
• ’shared’ drives you can’t share - not -local control of permissions
• documents you don’t know are out of date – not - control over the full document life-cycle
• keeping track of document sign-offs – not - workflows

Pick one of the popular ones, create a simple solution, and run with it.

Let’s read that again.

Pick one. Not a couple because they’re similar. Not three or four because Internal Communications want them (that’s your sponsor-and-project scenario and a very nice place it is to be too). Not two or three variants to cover all the bases. Just one.

Create a simple solution. Yes, there are half a dozen different ways to build and display a discussion forum in SharePoint. If you can’t tell which one works best, then put together one that works well and stick to it.

Then run with it. Get it out there. Get it used. Get comments and feedback. Improve it.

Only then move on to the next one. Bite size chunks. Could be as close to a month apart, but bite size chunks for you and your users.

The subtext here is simplicity. Turn off the ability to make subsites, remove most of the templates, switch off the themes. Lock it down. Shut it down. SharePoint is a casket of magical delights. You can always open a lid you’ve kept shut, but it is much harder to shut down a lid on something you’ve left open. SharePoint baffles new users and new organisations with choice. Lead them step by step through those choices.

And finally:

Champions

People like SharePoint. They really like SharePoint. Not everyone, but enough.

These people who like SharePoint are your friends. They are natural evangelists, experimenters and testers. They’ll pester you for the features that you’ve turned off, and they’ll come up with workarounds that’ll have you blessing and cursing them by turns. But they’ll promote it and provide free consultancy to their co-workers and come up with solutions to problems you didn’t know existed.

Really work your champions. Create a user forum and refuse to answer questions unless they are posted there. You’ll feel very prissy, but your Champions will gravitate there and get to know each other and do half your support work for you. Invite them to do in-house webinars on cool things in SharePoint, (20 minutes demo, 10 minutes Q&A). Create a SharePoint community of pratice with these people at its core. Take their advice on how to move your service forward.

So, how to sell collaboration services?

They key is asking the right question; in this case not ‘how do you roll-out SharePoint’ but ‘what does your organisation want to use SharePoint for?’

Oh, and bite size chunks.

Always bite size chunks.

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Book Review: WorldCom ‘Extraordinary Circumstances’ by Cynthia Cooper

Extraordinary Circumstances

I’ve wondered for a while why there are over half a dozen books about the collapse of Enron, but only two about WorldCom. Maybe it was because Enron happened first.  Maybe it was because Enron disappeared but WorldCom survived in the form of MCI, who presumably have lawyers. Maybe it’s because Enron’s story is sexier and more complex.

One of the few books available about WorldCom was written by the Vice President of Internal Audit, Cynthia Cooper: Extraordinary Circumstances the Journey of a Corporate Whistleblower.  Let’s get the housekeeping out of the way: it’s written in the present tense and has no illustrations, and both these things are constantly annoying.

So what actually happened at WorldCom?  According to Cooper, it was a fairly simple accounting fraud, well hidden but nowhere near as specialised as the off-balance sheet stuff at Enron, and it was committed to save the company not so a Fastow-figure could skim off illicit cream for personal gain. Basically, WorldCom played PacCom in the 1980s and 1990s munching up telecoms and internet companies but failing to integrate them.  Cooper asserts that it wasn’t the fraud or exposing the fraud that killed WorldCom; it became a dead company walking when the internet bubble burst in 2000 and sucked telecoms into its wake.

The most engaging section of the book is when Cooper tells the story of the few months before and after she and her team of internal auditors discovered the fraud, reported it to the internal audit committee and all hell broke loose. WorldCom had become a lumbering Frankenstein’s monster of acquisitions but it had no single set of operating systems. You can only only make savings from acquisitions by doing the boring operational stuff of cutting out duplication and waste. Instead it was faced with the rising costs involved in managing a hodge-podge of companies, falling revenues as telecoms tanked, and a share-price that burst with the bubble, and that was when CFO Scott Sullivan instigated the fraud. WorldCom started making a loss, but Sullivan reported non-existant profits by moving the cost of renting lines from operating costs to capital, to the tune of $3bn over 5 quarters and (according to Wikipedia) by over-stating sales.

The final few chapters of the book are among the most interesting. It’s clear that CFO Sullivan was, as the judge said, the architect of the fraud. Cooper says she could not decide in her own mind about CEO Bernie Ebbers’ guilt. The book is well lawyered, so although these doubts are phrased in the present tense they are located in the section before the jury came to their verdict.But in Cooper’s mind at that time at least the case against Ebbers was not-proven. Ebbers is serving 25 years, mainly on Sullivan’s testimony.  Sullivan has just finished a 5 year jail term.

The case against Ebbers hinged on the financial pressure he was under following the fall of telecoms stocks.  In April 2002 PacCom’s cigar-chewing, cowboy booted CEO packed up his stuff and left. He faced personal bankruptcy. He had been the king of the deal, driving forward to one takeover after another, and Cooper comments on how his personal style changed as he grew in hubris and then fear kicked in. By the end of his tenure he’d cancelled the free coffee and was issuing memos telling staff not to use the colour copiers. All his wealth was in WorldCom stock, and he borrowed against it, so when telecoms stocks collapsed he effectively ended up with ‘negative equity’ to the tune of $300 million dollars. Even so, there is no concrete proof he instigated, encouraged or permitted the fraud.  The only evidence against him was Sullivan’s testimony saying that Ebbers told him to commit fraud quarter by quarter by telling him ‘we must make the numbers’.

It’s hard to tell if this was plausible deniability in action, or a matter of style.  Cooper implies the latter, and the implication that a nod is as good as a wink in the C-Suite, or the C-Suite of WorldCom at least, is one of the other interesting aspects of the book. Because it’s a first person account, Cooper reports what was said and what she thought at various meetings throughout her career.  Most corporate auto-biographies are not about how people interact, being the narrative equivalent of a series of photographs of the mighty hunter clutching his rifle, one foot on an animal’s corpse.  Those biographies leave me wondering to what extent the C-Suite is a foreign country and how differently they do things there. Cooper casts some first-person light on this, and WorldCom appears to have been political and focused but less testosterone-fuelled than Enron, running at a rapid pace on cryptic comments, laconic remarks and inference.  One could argue, though Cooper is careful not to, that Ebbers is a modern-day Henry II.  If so, then the disparity in sentencing is troubling, to say the least.

As a British reader, there were two things I found intriguing which Cooper didn’t even notice.  One is that the main players are actively religious: Ebbers started each board meeting with a prayer, Cooper’s main contact with colleagues out of work is through their Church.  The second is that both WorldCom and Enron were companies located in the South, these are stories of hicks made good who went bad.  That’s not to say the patricians on the East Coast don’t do the same – look at our current banking crisis and the Wall St scandals of the 1980s.  Cooper mentions but does not explore the cultural differences between the various organisations that ultimately comprised WorldCom.

The book (like this review) is over-long and (unlike me) Cooper leaves it up to you to do your own analysis or not as you see fit.  But there is one extraordinary Ozymandias-like vignette:

It’s November, 2004.  The double glass doors to the executive suite are locked.  I peer through to see drops of water leaking from the ceiling in several spots, and a dimly lit room, many of the lights burned out and the remaining ones flickering, a ghostly symbol of the fall of a company and an executive team that once seemed invincible. The guard unlocks the doors and we file in.  Brown cardboard boxes are everywhere, each labeled with the name of a former WorldCom executive. There is barely room to walk. It feels as if we’re somehow trespassing on private property.  I read the names of people I used to work with as we slowly walk through. Bernie’s office is completely empty, not even a hook on the wall.

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Include me out

It’s not always obvious how our tools can distort our methods.

A colleague who was co-ordinating a social event recently sent out an email asking us to say what kind of food we’d prefer by using the voting buttons in our reply.  The choices were Indian, Chinese, Italian, No Preference.   “Cool use of the tool” I thought.

It was only a few days later that another colleague said how disappointed she was that the most popular option was Indian, because she really doesn’t like Indian food.  (How can anyone not like Indian food? – But that’s another bemusement for another day).

It was then that I realised that what was needed was not voting buttons, but vetoing buttons, with the option for vetoing more than one choice.

I’d have made the same mistake, and it’s an interesting one.

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I guess you gotta be here

It’s pretty easy to understand Web 2.0 intellectually, but to really get it, you’ve gotta be there.  Here.  All sorts of things get missed when decisions are based on assumptions that are intellectual constructs, not built out of practice and experience. We know this already: there is a strong difference between hospitals directed by clinicians even when their administrators are professional managers, and those  hospitals directed by administrators or – even worse – by management consultants who are neither managers nor consultants.

Years ago I had a smug boyfriend who said to me

To know and not to act is not to know

It is apparently a Chinese proverb.

In the years since then I’ve lost count of the number of people I’ve dealt with who understand the words used to discuss Web 2.0, but whose lives have not been affected by it.  No harm in that – I understand the words used to describe meditation, but I don’t meditate.  Each to our own, and all that.

The harm comes when these people make decisions about the use of Web 2.0. An example that is a few years old now, is the story of La Petite Anglaise, who was an Englishwoman working for the Pasis office of a boring and stuffy accountancy firm. Her employers fired her for bringing them into disrepute (hard, since her blog was anonymous), and that really DID bring them into disrepute.  They understood it, but they didn’t get it because they didn’t use it.

But blogging is so 2005, darlink.  The two more recent examples both come from the Twitterverse: the first is the story of Trafigura, and is summed up superbly by Colm, where the attempts to gag the Guardian turned out not to be a case of locking the stable door after the horse had bolted, so much as opening the  stable door and shooing a  self-replicating herd of wild mustangs out of the stable-yard and then announcing you’ve done so in great flashing neon lights which spooks the mustangs even more.  And the second is the 25,000 complaints to the Press Complaints Commission as a result of Jan Moir’s venomously homophobic article about Stephen Gately.  (Hetronormativity  - the acceptable face of homophobia).  In both cases people who should certainly have heard of Twitter fell foul of something they don’t understand because they don’t use it.

The place where this matters is where people are taking decisions about technology that they don’t use.  You can go to as many conferences you like and talk about people tweeting their comments from their mobiles, but unless you use it, you won’t get it.  You’ve gotta be in it to win it.

In fairness, while there’s a lot I do get about Web 2.0, there is stuff that I don’t get. I took a deliberate decision not to get involved in Second Life and I’m ambivalent about whether or not I regret it.  I also don’t yet get Twitter.  I use it, but I don’t yet get it.  Other than Colm’s excellent commentary about Twitter the other day, the most informative thing I’ve come across was in a Word Podcast.  (I like the Word Podcast – it’s conversational dad-dancing, conducted with a complacent lack of self-awareness which always brightens my day).

The “what will you give me for a box of flood-damaged Roogalator albums?” podcast

At minute 38 (if you care to listen) they start talking about Twitter, and at minute 44 or thereabouts they discuss the way in which Twitter is now the first place to go for news.  News: the new Olds .  Or possibly Google: the new Print Media.

What’s the take-away from this piece?  Just that in the words of Bob Dylan, “Don’t criticize what you can’t understand”.   And because you can’t beat a bit of Bob, here’s a clip,  and because it’s 2009 it’s from The Watchmen.

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How to improve your writing – 2

This the second of my occasional posts on writing simply and clearly, and here we consider how to tidy up a piece of text once you’ve got something written down. Examples are drawn from How to improve your writing 1 – the first part of this two-parter.

Work out what your verbal tics are, and edit your text to remove them

Make this a habit.   Here are some examples:

1. Remove all adverbs and adjectives and see what is left

Adverbs and adjectives are words that describe or qualify other words (the red balloon burst loudly). The following text won a Golden Bull in 2008 from the Plain English campaign:

‘Our goal at Balfour Beatty is to deliver consistent, long-term growth to our shareholders ... By becoming the partner of choice tosophisticated owners in our chosen disciplines and geographies, we believe we will achieve secure, industry best margins in ourcontracting activities and substantial, sustainable equity returns from our long-term investment portfolio.’

As you can see, this isn’t much better but it has helped us work out if the text contained anything of substance and how to re-organise it.

Our goal is to deliver long term growth to our shareholders, and we believe we’ll achieve this by becoming the partner of owners in our disciplines and geographies.

Sometimes, when you do this you’ll discover that what you’ve written goes round in circles.  If it does, cut it out.

2. Turn the passive voice into the active voice.

Making up an example was quicker than finding one.  The passive voice is considered to be particularly bad in process documentation because it is easy to forget about an actor who is never mentioned.

This becomes:

I found it quicker to make up an example than find one.  I particularly dislike it when a writer or analyst uses the passive voice in process documentation (the mat is sat upon) because I have no idea who is doing the sitting (the cat, presumably).

3. Look out for and eliminate any personal tics you may have.

I have a fondness for -ing verbs.  Here are some that I’ve cut out from an earlier version of this post:

This is about getting across information or ideas  …  anything which is just expanding or supporting the main points … the most important point you are making …  preparing our audience with subsidiary points and building up to a conclusion …

You have already seen how I got rid of those.

Don’t worry that you’ll  squeeze all the character out of your writing because you won’t: it is more important to be clear than quirky and you can be quirky and clear at the same time.

Have fun.

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Friday Faces

A little bit of odd fun on a Friday, courtesy of  St Andrews University – upload a picture of your smiling face and have a play.

West Asian Mona Lisa

East Asian Mona Lisa

Black Mona Lisa

Mucha Lisa

Mona by Botticelli

Modigliani Lisa

Manga Lisa

Manly Lisa in Drag

Hominid Lisa

Scary Baby Lisa

Mona Lisa Child

Moaning Lisa as a Teen

Old Lady Mona

Moaning Drunk

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Did Web 2.0 bankrupt Iceland?

Not by itself, no.  But Web 2.0, in particular the data-mashups on the comparison websites, the blogosphere and the consumer discussion boards, made the banking crisis broader and deeper than it would otherwise have been.  Or so I have just concluded, though I’ve not heard anyone else saying this.

‘How so?’ you ask.

Every now and again you come across a piece of research so startling that you have to get up at 6 in the morning and blog about it.  OK, I appreciate it is slightly odd to be reading a Deutsche Bank Research paper in bed at 05:45 am but I find I study best in the mornings, ok?

So here it is.

In 3 years the percentage of people who shopped around for financial products went up from 15% to 55%.

Consumer Empowerment 2002-2005

This is good, yes?  We get better value for money and it’s an end to the miss-selling scandals of the 1980s and 1990s.  The consumer wins and Martin Lewis rules, right?

Right?

Ri-ight.  And I certainly do use comparison web-sites to shop around for financial services and utilities. But…

But presumably if you flip this around it means that during the middle three years of this decade the banks found they could no longer rely on inertia to sell 85% of their products for them.  And that, my chickadees, is an astonishing upheaval.  And I believe that the graph above  goes a long way towards telling us why the credit crunch (the consequences of which will outlast the lifespan of my pension) was so deep and so disturbingly global.

You see, this swing in consumer habits is astonishing. It is a tectonic shift in the financial services industry in its own right.  It’s huge.  And it tells us a lot about the pressures that the retail banks were under during the period leading up to the crisis last  year to create comparison-site winners.  No bloody wonder that when Northern Rock created that pernicous 125% mortgage the Coventry and HBOS followed suit.  They had to, or lose business.  And no wonder that a niche and specialist product – the self certified mortgage – ended up comprising almost half the mortgage market. The market over-heated when information became friction-free, the regulators didn’t stop the bankers and the bankers couldn’t stop themselves.

I won’t say that Martin Lewis made them do it, but I will say that bad business drives out good.  Putting it simply, the banks cut margins to the point where they couldn’t afford the products they sold us.   The chart above just puts numbers on the pressures they were under: in 2002 a bank or insurance company could, it seems, rely on 85% of its customers not to shop around for the best deal.  So it was relatively easy for it to sell us sustainable products that were not artificially competitive. And, yes, it could also miss-sell us inappropriate products; the force has a light side and a dark side after all.  But in three short years, by 2005, it seems that only 45% of it’s customers would buy the first product they’re offered.  As I said, I would love to know what that figure is now.

For a while, this unsustainable business put artificial pressure on the sustainable businesses. Look at the period from 2003 to 2006 in the chart below.  HBOS’s lending products were super-competitive, it was increasingly successful, and it left Lloyds TSB standing. But as we can see, early in 2007 the chickens tumbled home to roost.

LLoyds vs HBOS share movements 2002-2009

(Unfortunately the Telegraph’s excellent free charting service does not let me plot a specific stock against its sector but HBOS tracked the sector and Lloyds didn’t).

And Iceland? Could Iceland’s banks have grown their foreign business in the way that’s charted below without individuals and organisations overseas shopping around on-line?

Growth of Icelandic Financial Services 2001-2008

I don’t know the answer to that question. It could be co-incidence; I have to admit that the paper I got the chart from argues against interventionism, but I needed to reference Iceland again to justify a cheap headline.  However, the chart above indicates that Iceland’s foreign assets and liabilities appear to have gone up six- or eight-fold between 2002 and 2005, and it seems implausible to me that Iceland could have got so much consumer business in that time without consumers responding to online reviews and advertising.

So – is this yet another case of my only love springing from my only hate?

Web 2.0 is immensely liberating.  It is amazing that we have so much access to so much competitive information.  It is great for us as individuals that we can protect ourselves from being ripped off by banks and utilities.  But there’s no two ways about it – Web 2.0 changed consumers’ financial services buying patterns in a way that amplified the competitive pressures on the retail banks, and that is the untold story of the credit crunch.

As my grandmother used to warn me: too much ice-cream is bad for you.

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References:

Philip Bagus and David Howden (2009)
Iceland’s Banking Crisis: The Meltdown of an Interventionist Financial System

Stefan Heng, Thomas Meyer, Antje Stobbe (2007)
Implications of Web 2.0 for Financial Institutions: Be a Driver, Not a Passenger

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For your listening pleasure

iCat

Weekly podcasts – listen while you cook, drive, clean or run. These are stayers – regularly broadcasting and regularly worth listening to.   These are all made as podcasts and not radio programmes, with just one exception.

Funnies

The Bugle – Andy Zaltzman and John Oliver riff irreverently off the week’s news and each other. Childish, intelligent, infectious. A weekly must.
Web
iTunes

Answer me this - My but those Zaltzmen are clever.  And funny. Andy’s sister Helen (barely employed arts graduate), Olly Mann (hopeful weblebrity) and Helen’s partner Martin (long-haired physicist) chat about listeners’ questions, Ollie’s suspect personal hygiene, films, tv shows and books.
Web
iTunes

Narratives

The Moth – ‘true stories told live on stage without notes’. There isn’t a dud among these; these are the wierd and funny s**t that happens to people, all superbly told. Breathtaking.
Web
iTunes

Escape Pod – a good collection of short(ish) science fiction stories – some of them classics of the genre, all of them appropriately read.
Web
iTunes

History

Norman Centuries – neat 20 minute episodes of enjoyable narrative history from Lars Brownworth who brought us the really excellent 12 Byzantine Rulers.
Web – Web
iTunes – iTunes

The History of Rome - an exceptional podcast covering the 800 year sweep from the wolf to the barbarians; we are currently on episode 70 or so and we’ve recently seen off Nero and are just about to have fun with the Flavians. A joy for the sarcastic asides alone. The man deserves an award.
Web
iTunes

Critical Thinking

Skeptoid – Brian Dunning is getting sharper and more impatient as the months go by, but these 10 minute deconstructions of popular myths are each of them well worth listening to.
Web
iTunes

Point of Inquiry - intelligent but agenda-driven conversations on religion, scepticism and society.  Not to everyone’s taste, but heady stuff if you like it.
Web
iTunes

Conversation

Stuff you should know and The Things you Missed in History Class – endearing conversations on various subject by How Stuff Works staffers. They are sweetly enthusiastic on the topic de semain, and the girls have a breathy intelligence which is rather hot, while the boys are more laid-back and dudey.
Web – Web
iTunes – iTunes

Forum – a world of ideas – This is definitely one that gives the synapses a stretch, but it’s hard to find on the radio, tucked away on the World Service.  If In Our Time aims at graduates, then this aims at post-grads.  Bridget Kendall plays off three or four world-class experts superbly,  usually a scientist and a social scientist and an artist or writer.
Web
iTunes

Business – since this is supposed to be a business-related blog

Lucy Kellaway - 5 minute doses of acerbic comment on working and corporate life from a regular columnist on the FT. I also enjoy Martin Wolf’s economics podcast from the FT: his calm authoritative tone sounds soothing, but what he says frequently scares me witless.
Web – Web
iTunes – iTunes

Business Week – Behind this Week’s Cover Story - 15 minutes of conversation with the writer of each week’s front page story; an easy way to keep an ear out for current topics in the American Business press.
Web
iTunes

I’ll do this again soon and blog about new additions to my iPod: I’ve just discovered iTunes-U and a whole load of new podcasts from newbie podcasters including Richard Wiseman…

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