Way of Words | Stewardship | Longitudinal Social Mobility | My Performance Event
Way of Words | Stewardship | Longitudinal Social Mobility | My Performance Event
↠My Performance-Lecture, Thinking Bigly, 17 June.
--->Booking open here, FREE. Code = Bigly.
↠Gricean Maxims: Way of Words
↠Stewardship: Its cost and importance
↠Longitudinal Inequality: Social mobility
↠Psychological Safety for Winning Teams
↠Why America is called America
↠Autism, Parenthood and Death
↠Food photo of the week
↠My radio play: Places In Between
Please come to my June 17 Performance-Talk Thinking Bigly. If you want to see me only once this year make it this.
Booking open here, FREE. Code = Bigly. Or email me for a spot.
A theatre performance talk about sustainability and how you, finance and policy can be part of the solution. What reasons do we have to be hopeful in the current crisis moment? Brief details and a couple of pictures here: https://www.thendobetter.com/thinking-bigly
It’s a form of anti-TED talk. The event is interactive and we speak to why the colour pink, koalas and interst rates; and second order thinking plus cultural changes gives me hope on climate. Who wouldn’t take notice of a dance-off between Beyonce, Trump and Kim ? Booking open here
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Thanks to all those who came to Mingle. Another marvellous evening so you all tell me! If you want to see DIDO, here's a ticket offer. Save 10% use promocode DIDO10 when booking online or calling 020 7645 0560. Offer valid for performances on 16 May 7pm, 19 May 2pm, 23 May 7pm, 25 May 1.30pm & 7pm.
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Been super busy meeting companies and thinking about the long-term over last couple of weeks. Out of this a few recurring themes on the importance of culture, the trickiness of hiring right, and the difficulties of complexity. And at a team/cultural level, the importance of psychological safety.
I’m aiming to completely finish my first draft of Rail Song. First new play in a decade or so, and trying to have it complete for the Bruntwood prize (UK play competition early June deadline). After a moderately long public-facing creative break Rail Song and Thinking Bigly are two new works for 2019.
Trundling in the background: thoughts for the week are what to do about secondary school provision for learning disability/autism; how difficult/costly etc it would be/is to get to Zurich by train rather than plane; the recurrence of the debate on shareholder primacy. I've also made a mini-summary of my theory on why UK productivity is low (it's mainly due to Pharma and Telcos), email me for more.
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Again, perusing Stephen Jeffrey’s manual on how to write plays. He speaks about Grice’s Maxims and when breaking them has created some of our most brilliant theatre characters.
The philosopher of language, Paul Grice, made the following observations about how conversation works in his 1989 book Studies in the Way of Words, which have come to be known as the ‘Gricean Maxims’.
Maxim of Quantity
1. Make your contribution to the conversation as informative as necessary.
2. Do not make your contribution more informative than necessary.
Maxim of Quality
1. Do not say what you believe to be false.
2. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.
Maxim of Relevance
Be relevant (i.e. say things related to the current topic of the conversation).
Maxim of Manner
1. Avoid obscurity of expression.
2. Avoid ambiguity.
3. Be brief (avoid unnecessary wordiness).
4. Be orderly.
When an audience is listening to stage dialogue, they will expect it to follow these basic conventions. However, what can be really interesting is to occasionally break the rules. You can experiment with breaking the rules systematically, one at a time, and you will find that extremely interesting things start to happen to your dialogue…. 3 min blog here: https://www.thendobetter.com/arts/2019/5/8/grice-maxims
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Alex Edmans and Tom Gosling writing in the FT on Stewardship: “Strong corporate governance requires specialised stewardship on issues such as strategy, capital allocation, and intangible investments. Such stewardship can only be undertaken by investors who thoroughly understand a company.
Monitoring and engagement are time-consuming and expensive and so a large stake is critical to incentivise an investor. This is the realm of active investors. For this to work, we need active funds to be truly active and for each stock they own to be a “conviction holding” that they are committed to steward, rather than held by default because it is part of the benchmark.
A fund that is spread thinly across hundreds of companies may not bother to deeply understand each one. Bizarrely, it may have disincentives to engage even if it holds a positive stake — if it holds less than the benchmark, then improving company performance will cause it to underperform its benchmark.” FT Opinion piece: https://on.ft.com/2H97my1
Behind paywall, msg me if you'd like gift article.
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I didn’t appreciate why America is called America, until reading Harari’s Sapiens. I’m really ignorant on history. Harari suggests an important idea was the acknowledging of all the knowledge we don’t know. Short blog on how America got its name here: https://www.thendobetter.com/arts/2019/5/11/why-america-is-called-america
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On thinking about the the data around inequality, I had not considered fully the longitudinal data.
This is an oversight especially considering my background. We started off mid-tier economically, with some low tier/working class (we don’t call it working class in Asia, typically - that’s more a British notion) elements but with a valuable “education asset”. Objectively, I am now in one of the very highest tiers socio-economically. My family have risen in wealth enormously over the years.
Now my birth tier itself has not improved as much as my current rich tier, but there has been social mobility. Importantly, the people in the tier are different.
The social mobility data itself is complex. There is evidence that cities and in the UK, especially London, do well in promoting social mobility and (to me) this is likely due to agglomeration / network effects. Social mobility happens in rich and poor areas of London, so absolute wealth is not, potentially, the key problem. Short 3 min blog and paper links here: https://www.thendobetter.com/investing/2019/5/11/a-longitudinal-look-at-inequality
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From Anoushka’s blog on Death, Autism and Parenthood.
“I can’t remember how I came to know of death. Certainly, sooner than Spike but, otherwise, in a similar fashion. We are both fortunate not to have lost anyone close to us in the early years of childhood. A standard diet of movies, books, games, news reports and personal stories, nevertheless, eventually congealed into this blank wall that we all face (or door, if you are religiously-inclined). While the notion of death can only be a blow - and there is no right way to process this information - Spike has grappled with it quite dissimilarly to me. I suppressed thoughts of death, and only allowed myself little sideways glances at it, sensing that I should take my time to come to terms with it….” 4 min personal blog: https://spitting-yarn.com/blog/hardcore
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Effective teams are not a magic algorithm. Dependability. Clarity. Work Meaning. Work impact and most of all Psychological Safety: Feeling secure to ask questions and take risks without feeling embarrassed or insecure.
Who is on a team matters less than how the team members interact, structure their work, and view their contributions. So much for that magical algorithm.
Google learned that there are five key dynamics that set successful teams apart from other teams at Google:
Psychological safety: Can we take risks on this team without feeling insecure or embarrassed?
Dependability: Can we count on each other to do high quality work on time?
Structure & clarity: Are goals, roles, and execution plans on our team clear?
Meaning of work: Are we working on something that is personally important for each of us?
Impact of work: Do we fundamentally believe that the work we’re doing matters?
Importance of Psychological Safety for teams (4 min blog): https://www.thendobetter.com/investing/2017/7/23/team-work-what-google-found
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Food photo of the week:
Chicken Stock making. Continuing efforts to lower food waste. Turning left over chicken carcass into soup/stock. If we are going to eat the animal, we shoudl respectfully eat all of it and make as much use of it as possible.
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From the Archive: Nassim Taleb on Climate change - about precaution thought deadling with complex systems and as humans have only one planet.
Ruminations on Hair Loss and Black identity - triggered by thinking about my own reaction to my hair loss but the much more fraught conflicts over black female fair identity
Charlie Munger Life lessons: the slightly less famous Billionaire partner of Warren Buffet. Lots of interestign ideas, particularly about using the inversion technique.
Neil Gaiman's brilliant commencement address on making brilliant mistakes - the ones only you can make. (wonderful, fabulous, brilliant mistakes). An importance of mistakes speech.
Sheryl Sandberg - her commencement address speaking about the sudden death of her husband, on grief, resilience and gratitude (She has taken a knock post FB shenaningans but her speech is still moving)
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I’ve re-issued my 2006 play, Yellow Gentlemen (4 stars in Time Out and is one of my more personal works about the night immigrant Tommy Lee is dying). Buy it for laughs on Kindle for the price of a coffee. All profits to charity. I’ve only sold a few copies at the price of a coffee - 1.99.
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The Places in Between is a travel narrative by British writer and (as of 2018) UK Member of Parliament Rory Stewart, detailing his solo walk across north-central Afghanistan in 2002. The below is the Minaret of Jam that he came across. You can listen to my 45 min radio play based on his book here: www.thendobetter.com/places-in-between
“...Through a long-term orientation and stewardship, this is the time for active investment managers to show their worth. It starts with asking the right long-term business questions. Some companies are giving us answers, but are we really listening?”
My full opinion article in the FT. (3 mins, behind paywall, but you get a free article or email me and I can send you a copy)
Find out more about my aphorism book and contact me for a copy.
We've help found Focus West London, a Saturday club for autistic children. Children learn vital play, social and language skills in a fun and child-centred environment. Every child is provided with a volunteer therapist trained in a highly effective behavioural intervention. It's a difficult climate for charitable organisations like Focus, so your donation really matters.
Details are here. THANK YOU!
Notes from a conversation with former Royal Court Lit. Manager.