Saturday means football

Well our preparations for the match against Cambridge have continued well. We played the Law Faculty, established a 2-0 lead at half time, made a bunch of substitutions, made it 3-0, made some more substitutions and finished 3-3. The difference was that the team who played in the first half have played many more games together - discipline and cohesion starting to show at last.

Then it's home to listen to the end of Man U Charlton on the radio (those Mancunian swine are going to win it again...) and now West Ham Chelsea as the live commentary while I sweat on the result for Newcastle at St James Park. If we win and Chelsea or Liverpool lose we're fine, and West Ham seem to have come out of the dressing room determined to make Chelsea go home crying...

Update Newcastle won, Chelsea and Liverpool lost. This means Newcastle will finish third in the premiership, regardless of what happens. Meanwhile Chelsea and Liverpool are going to play each other next week (gotta love the fixture computer) with £15m+ at stake. West Ham's victory gives one of the nicest teams in football the chance to hang on in the Premiership, possibly by relegating Leeds United, one of the nastiest. More likely Bolton will be the ones to drop, which is a shame, but its relegation that makes football leagues the fantastic things they are...

Mayday first hand

Now I'm still not convinced about the use of the Mayday protests, but Tim's adventures in London have pretty much convinced me that the police are at least half the problem here. That's not to say that there isn't a hardcore minority determined to smash things, but there definantely is a peaceful majority and as this account makes clear the Police aren't all that interested in them. Neither are the media.

So read this report and as with so many other things wonder how so many people who's hearts are certainly in the right place can end up in such a mess.

The Guardian have a slightly different take on the whole thing, but by and large both sets of reports could easily be accurate. I was in London myself on Thursday visiting the offices of IDEO but aside from a few more socialist worker newspaper sellers than usual I noticed nothing.

Gone to Texas

The business school team at Mootcorp have landed and it sounds like they're having fun. I however am more interested in the fact that had only I been there my tablemanners would have outdone those of my usually better half.

Of course she can't eat peas off the back of her fork either, so I win on both high and low culture. Woohoo!

The other Oxford

As you head out of the business school past our 'local', Antiquity Hall there's a lad begging. Well, not really begging. I've not seen him ask for money, he just says hello, wishes you a good day, that kind of thing as he sits in his sleeping bag trying not to freeze. Today his persistence paid off, like everyone who walks around the city I get hassled by Oxford's homeless pretty much everyday, so for him not hassling people is such a worthwhile tactic that I figured it deserved a payoff. I also stopped for a chat.

The good news is this lad is on his way to being off the streets. Reading between the lines I think he's got a habit to forget about first, but he seems to be on the right track. The less good news was that the two kids who've been begging round Oxford are exactly what I thought they were, professional beggers. Their pitch is always the same "Scuuuuuse me, I'm not a begger or anything, I just need some help with... " Sometimes its cabfare home, sometimes its money for the youth hostel. Doesn't matter, I'm told they're not homeless, they commute from London. Apparently they think they're friends to the rest of the homeless. The homeless don't agree.

Oxford, thanks to its large number of tourists, moneyed student population and near to London location has a terrible homeless problem. Or at any rate it has a homeless problem on behalf of everywhere within about fifty miles. As I've said before, how did a nation as rich as ours end up in this mess?

I don't know.

Marching for Mayday

I've noticed a few of my fellow business school bloggers have taken time to comment on Europes May Day celebrations / protests. My personal view is that the groups who march are so internally divided and lacking in long term goals that there's not much point going. I've been on enough demos that got hijacked by extremists thankyou.

I was chatting with a classmate yesterday who commented that it would be impossible for him to turn up to a demo if he thought that far right opinions were likely to be voiced in any capacity. The problem is that these demos aren't for a specific cause, so the loudest, nastiest and most pointless elements come to the fore. Which is a shame.

Tim feels differently though, and with his most creative activist hat on he came up with a number of cool things to try while demonstrating.

Read about them here.

It's sad

Luck Goldstar thinks I've been on a tear lately. He doesn't know the half of it. Today was depressing. We had our first class on corporate responsibility. We watched a panorama report on Nike and Gap's use of third world (Cambodian) labour in 2000. Then we discussed it. Never mind that 12 year olds had been pressed into work by family and social pressure, never mind that workers were on 16 hour shifts without a break for slave wages. Never mind that these poor people are living in a shanty town.

To see some of my colleagues find the justifications, to parrot out the corporate line. It turned my stomach. I'm convinced that not one of the people in that room would have run the factory in the video the way it was run. If instead of sloping off to our pretty jobs in corporateville we took a job running a factory in Cambodia we wouldn't be like this. We wouldn't allow staff to beat the workers for asking for time off. We wouldn't enforce overtime or insist on sixteen hour shifts. We'd find a way to pay more than the minimum wage. We wouldn't hire 12 year olds who look like 12 year olds. We'd be better than that. But ask us in the abstract, ask us if it might be ok, ask us about the unreal world of rhetoric...

You see its not real, its in Cambodia, which if any of us have been there at all is a place you go on holiday. Pass through travelling and look at the temples. Smoke something interesting and don't tread on the landmines. Nike and Gap outsourced their morals and exported ours. Can we have absoloute morals, yeah, don't hit your workforce. Can we tell the age of a worker, yeah, don't employ kids with puppy fat. Can we do anything about the Nike shoes and Gap clothes in our wardrobe? Yeah, justify the company in class. Salve your conscience.

My football boots are Nike (see above). My music is from paid up members of the RIAA (assaults on privacy and civil liberty), my laptop is Dell (God knows what's inside). We've gotta get out of this place, but they sold the exit signs while we weren't looking.

Meanwhile, if like Lucky you're forming your opinions of No Logo from the pages of the Economist take a moment to read this. Personally I'd suggest you read the book. Naomi is by no means perfect, plenty of her evidence is open to challenge and badly handled, but don't buy second hand opinions kids, you don't know where they've been.

Happy days

My old college Junior Common Room have a top notch website. For a glimpse of undergraduate life in oxford you could do much worse than the LMH JCR. Nice to see the darts team finally won a match. One of my earliest memories of college is being hauled down to Merton because they were on the verge of recording their first victory in five years. When we got there they were still in front. We bought beer, we sang. We bought our team beer, they lost. C'est la vie.

Business hits football, again

Leeds united, last season one of the biggest clubs in the English league are not fighting not relegation, but bankruptcy. Thing is, with the transfer market so far depressed a handful of clubs with decent amounts of money are going to be able to snap up quality players for a pittance and the management will have to agree, in part because of the astronomical wages these players are on. Their market capitalisation is down to an meagre £12m, a fraction of the value of their playing squad. Their debts however are £78m.

Its a bit early, but could they be relegation favourites this time next year? I doubt it, but the glory days are long gone from Elland Road.

All the more reason to hope my team Newcastle make it into the champions league where, at least for another two seasons, money more or less grows on trees.

Editing time

Some of my classmates have raised valid concerns about some of my recent posts. There will be some editing. Apologies if this confuses anyone.

That said this should be a no holds barred, warts and all look at what goes on inside the business school, and to a lesser extent my head. Several people have taken issue (in detail) with my views on Friedman and Klein (below). Well they're my views and make what you will of them.

Other concerns have been related chiefly to privacy and the image of the school. It's fair to say that my policy of never naming anyone without their express permission slipped in relation to faculty which probably wasn't legitimate. (Have to find out if Oxford lectures are public). I am trying to achieve what I hope will be a consensus with integrity.

when I feel with my heart, I know in my mind
I should say with my lips
but does that make you feel upset?

World of Blogs

Check this out. Credit to Lucky Goldstar for finding the link

In other news, Iraq looks more like the West Bank every day Credit to CNN for giving this much better coverage than some earlier instances of US troops firing on protesters.

What went on in marketing

Its fair to say marketing was controversial in the way it was taught and the reception it recieved. I've decided to email the professor who gave the course to ask for his thoughts on what went on. If they're not forthcoming I will try and write something balanced about it. (I thought I had, others thought not...)

Milton Friedman must be stopped!

In contrast to my views on Naomi Klein (see below) I think Milton Friedman is a dangerous extremist. I've just read his 1970 article 'The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase it's Profits' which appeared in the New York Times Magazine in 1970. I think it's a particularly nasty bit of polemic. Here's a flavour

"Businessmen who talk this way (advocate social responsibility) are unwitting puppets of intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society for these past decades"

"the businessman... is to be simultaneously legislator, executive and, jurist"

Aside from anything else the piece suggests that Milton never took the time to read anyone elses political philosophy, he just wrote down the first few things that popped into his red scare addled mind. So here's a question for Milton.

As a socially responsible individual I don't play loud music at 3 in the morning even when I want to. My neighbours would be pissed off. I voluntarily choose to limit my actions in the name of social responsibility. This is an instance of 'negative responsibility' I choose not to do something.

Now if I am managing a construction company I may discover that the cheapest time to do road maintenance is in the middle of the night, and that doing so would be legal. It'll wake up the neighbourhood, but thanks to the country I'm in I can't be sued or prosecuted.

As moral people neither I nor any of my employees would want to wake up the neighbourhood. But as employees Friedman argues that we should. Thanks to the miracle of incorporation we are now resolved of all moral responsibility which has been transferred to the shareholders. Moreover, since shareholders hold a 'universal portfolio' (or they would if they were rational) it seems every one in the world has a say in whether or not I wake up the neighbors. At any rate this will have to go to a board meeting and be voted on.

Clearly not all decisions like this should go to the board. Imagine the weekly list of neighbourhoods which may or may not be disturbed or the endless requests as to whether this or that garbage dump should be used. My construction company will set a policy. I imagine it will tell me to be socially responsible, trust my own judgement, do what they would do. After all, the shareholders are by and large moral folk who don't believe in waking people up at night, were each and every one of them in my shoes a clear majority would choose not to dig up the road. Since they have no interest in adjudicating separately each and every moral dilemma faced by their employees they choose to set a policy. They choose to be socially responsible.

Alternatively the shareholders, who as individuals can exercise their own moral choices choose to maximise profits. People are woken up. Garbage is placed in less than ideal places. Every company everywhere suddenly loses its moral compass. There will be protests, governments will intervene. Regulations are enacted and enforcement officers recruited. The state balloons out of all proportion in an attempt to impose the morals of it's constituents on its coroporate bodies. Taxes rise.

What I'm trying to get at is a conception that social responsibility is necessary to the smooth functioning of an economy. By adopting a set of social conventions we avoid the costs of regular decision making or constant supervision and regulation. We also allow each and every one of us to own shares in the knowledge that our investments are moral ones that we would choose to make on an individual case by case basis.

Now this doesn't work either, but that's because companies fail to be responsible - not because they try at all.

Who's afraid of Naomi Klein?

Naomi Klein has come in for a bit of a battering this week. Both my brand lecturers have taken a moment to knock her work, not in a direct manner, more in a 'very nice in its own way but misguided, poor girl' kind of way. The class then smirks and laughs in its best manner and a few more students decide not to bother reading the book.

Which is a shame.

You see at its heart No Logo is not an attack on brands, it's a history of them and an analysis of what they've been up to lately. It is oddly non-judgemental about the advance of brands into public spaces and the growing influence of corporations. What Naomi Klein objects to is things like the exploitation of child labour, the abysmal treatment of some employees and the failure of our society to protect things like the classroom from outside influence. These by and large are not contentious positions, companies should not exploit children, abuse their staff or turn classrooms into advertising sessions. These things are bad. Naomi would like us to do something about this.

In particular Naomi would like us to target a number of high profile successful companies and in a kind of judo-protest turn the power of their advertising against them. Brands aren't bad per se, its just that several of the companies with big brands are doing bad things, and the one point of weakness that people can get at is their brand. Make enough noice about Nike's labour practices and its news, target a dozen garment factories in Thailand that no-one has ever heard of and who cares?

So is No Logo really anti-corporate, anti-brand or even anti-globalisation? I don't think so. I think no logo is an attempt to identify a connected set of issues and document the way a new protest movement has sought to combat them through brand subversion.

On the other hand, by the time 'Fences and Windows' came out Naomi really had joined the revolution, which was a bit of a shame. She's not very good revolutionary, but she was bloody good at documenting, analysing and making sense of stuff, a task that is necessary if we're going to manage our new global marketplace in a way that lets us go shopping without feeling guilty.

Search rankings take a hammering

Hmm, seems I've been dropping off the lists at Google and Yahoo. I stopped monitoring traffic on this site about four months ago. I've just started again for the homepage only and it seems I'm getting almost no search engine traffic at all. On the other hand I had around 80 visitors over the weekend which is about what I used to get.

So I guess the gradual accumulation of links is bringing me traffic - as well as the odd member of class choosing to read this, but otherwise no. Fortunately I have some major publicity coming my way soon - more when it happens.

Back to work

Term starts properly tomorrow which means I've spent some of the weekend getting on with the reading. One thing that is very noticable this term is the willingness of faculty to recommend their own work on reading lists. My experience as an undergraduate was that Dons (Oxford Tutors) didn't like doing this, even when they were the world experts on the subject. This term though there seems to be no such restraint, I don't think its a good or a bad thing, I just think it's different.

One thing doesn't change though. Harvard Business School case studies remain the worst form of fiction known to man. Dull, formulaic and laboured. I really think that the alleged benefits of case studies (you learn from an examination of the real world) are being taken away by the demands of the genre. My experience of the real world was that the biggest problem was selection of appropriate evidence, a ten page case study however has already pre-selected an enormous amount of data, as well as a particular moment in time for examination. Facts are effortlessly rearranged to present the everyday randomness of things as a coherent story. I'm sure this makes the subjects of the case studies feel all lovely and warm but I'm unsure as to it's usefullness.

We don't actually do that many case studies here, at least not in the classic sense of ploughing through these god awful documents as a substitute for thinking, but we do get a few. Maybe two or three a week.