Number of words: 609 A story tells of two schoolboy friends, one brilliant at maths, one innumerate to the point of idiocy, who meet much later when the first is a professor and the second a multi-millionaire. Unable to control his curiosity, the professor asks the figure-blind dunderhead how he man- aged to amass his … Read more
Number of words: 751 Mesmerised managers have fallen for their own con-devices. They have been persuaded that new computer models, like new cars, or new soaps, or new cigarettes, represent some major advance on the previous ones. So they may- but not in terms of practical use. A few of the first computers ever built … Read more
Number of words: 630 The greater the risk, the smaller the case for the project. Risk-taking holds its pride of place among the managerial virtues for reasons deep in managerial psychology, for managers need no urging to take chances. The most purblind old buffer in the boardroom will cheerfully approve ventures of total insecurity. The … Read more
Number of words: 481 The marketeers have not only pushed production men into the cold – they have ousted the salesman. The standard sneer against ‘non-marketing-orientated’ companies is that they have merely called the sales manager a marketing manager. This is more sensible than importing a dear and dearly educated marketing manager and downgrading the … Read more
Number of words: 573 By business standards, however, McNamara’s reign at the Pentagon was an enormously expensive failure. His hatchet-men found many sweet cost savings – the duplicated purchasing which bedevils all widely spread businesses had become gross in the Pentagon, and the management techniques which produce better housekeeping were badly needed. But exacting more … Read more
Number of words: 430 The shareholders are remote licensers. They get a cut of any profits and in return they licence the managers to do as they please with the assets. More: they let managers do what they like (apart from outright theft) with the value of the shares. If the management longs to dilute … Read more
Number of words: 702 Much has been made about the tension between fuel crops and food crops and that the growing of biofuels, especially ethanol, is leading to food price inflation. But there are good Biofuels and bad biofuels. In the United States, most ethanol is made from corn and, in 2007, US farmers grew … Read more
Number of words: 369 Canada is seen as the great saviour by oil enthusiasts. Canada has the world’s most extensive oil sands, estimated by some to be capable of producing 2.5 trillion barrels of oil! Sound too good to be true? It is. Oil (or tar) sands are a mix of asphalt (bitumen), earth, sand and … Read more
Number of words: 217 Decomposing organic matter over millions of years produced oil when underground heat of up to 150°C kick-started the process of changing it into hydrocarbons, which come in different degrees of complexity from the simple mixture of one carbon atom and four hydrogen atoms to make methane – CH – to the … Read more
Number of words: 210 Civilisations have fallen because of an inability to acquire sufficient quantities of energy, food and metals. Societies that have managed to control access to natural resources have survived and those that have failed have become extinct. The Spanish conquistadores’ pillage of Peru and Mexico, destroying both the Aztec and Inca cultures, … Read more
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