This 76 year old man is still active every harvest.

Just watch and enjoy.
And then ask yourself, if management communication might be better off by telling stories. Here an good example of how an employee might tell his boss how his leadership qualities might be perceived.

With the UK elections in a few weeks time, it is interesting how the message of crisis and change has evolved over time. Below a few examples - admittedly, the situations may vary tremendously - but in the wake of the financial crisis, recession and the level of public debt engulfing all countries today, it is clear that elections, where ever they might be held, have become far more important.

Here, Sir Winston Churchill



Followed by Harold Macmillan

 

A little later, Harold Wilson


Sir Edward Heath had a few words to say




Margaret Thatcher needs no introduction



Labour in the 1992 election



There is not much available on John Major and elections.



Tony Blair, in 1997 with "New Labour" winning the election.



And now, the Labour Party manifesto anno 2010.



it is one of a few, so here the offering on the economy:


You can watch others on this Youtube link.


I don't know if its me, but as the world has become more sophisticated, has our method of communication become more dumbing down and less inspiring?

You may not have heard this, it hasn't gone viral yet. But the beauty of my social network is how it keeps me informed.

Given our propensity to self promotion, make ourselves more important than we are and the film industry's desperate attempts at filling cinemas, the American Film Academy has come up with a new category in next year's Oscars.

Best self promotional video.

Because this is such an expensive category to run, and with all the wannabe casting tools being grabbed by future stars before the pixels have managed to dry, Google decided to sponsor the event. In typical fashion, they created a rather cute little tool which helps us mere unintelligent mortals get sucked into the illusion that we are simply the best and deserve nothing but the best. Of course, we don't have to do anything except simply be!

"I am therefore I be!" Wasn't that what Descartes said a long time ago? Or was it: "I be, therefore I am."
Oh, I don't know - can someone Google it for me please?

Anyway, fun aside, there is actually a fun little application which crawled its way into my world overnight. Youtube Search Story - a little thingy which allows you to make a little fun video. Fun being the operative word here.

I won't bore you with the laborious creation process - except that for some strange reason, it didn't work on my Chrome browser - I switched to Firefox.

Please let me preview to you my dark horse entry for the Film Festival in Cannes next month. A deeply moving epic on the youngest member in our family. Promotion is actually quite easy as well. I just need to link it to the Facebook page and all the friends get to see it. I will also be working on merchandising later today.



What I find interesting as well as that all the hard, creative work, the hours of toil, the large spectrum of ideas and thoughts which is my creativity does get a very simple, highly efficient credit at the end of this blockbuster.
Nobody watches the credits anyway - so why bother including them, except for the most important one.

Being a little more serious here, this little application can have some other uses - promotion, advertising or in presentations as an ice breaker.

Here my contribution to promote tourism of our region here in France. It is already on its way to Paris as I write this blog.

I was chewing this over with Marissa Mayer, as she dropped by for a Tarte Flambee yesterday evening, and she did see my point that the whole thing also does have an unfair American bias and that maybe Google's search engine capabilities were a little restricted on this front. So, maybe in a few nano-seconds, because this is all it really takes to change the world, we should have this bug sorted out as well.





Isn't life wonderful?

PS. Marissa did promise me my own personal algorithm if I help promote Google in this blog entry.

A new search engine was introduced today. I don't think I need to explain all the changes that Google have been slowly incorporating into their search engine - except that it is becoming more and more business oriented and commercial.

For others who need other types of data, an interesting alternative was thrown on the net today. Wolfram Alpha, a computational search engine - it's strong points are a mathematical, statistical approach.

It's a further step in linking all the databases parked on all the servers throughout the world, known as Web 3.0 or semantic web. Ask a question, get an answer! Well, maybe. Early days yet, but it's a start.





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Last Saturday the phone rang and a school girl, who had been given my name, asked if I could sort out her problems with English grammar. Not my core business but my little friend, @art, has been giving me grief of late. So I said yes.

She popped by Tuesday afternoon and again earlier this afternoon. My forage into the French education system has left me a little flabbergasted. From what I have experienced, it is very much old Europe. Listen, answer questions, do not think out of the box. It is a preparation for ensuring that the "system" will survive in the future, and also one of many reasons, why Sarkozy is so unpopular. He is modernising the system - but nobody really has been educated for it.

Cross the border into Germany and one enters an orderly, peaceful cocoon. Germany's mantra is quality. Superior quality and reliability - built for life with eternal guarantees. It comes at a price and when others ran out of money, Germany has always been left with a problem. But somehow, it has adapted, not out of it's own free will but rather by the brute force that is globalization.

England to me seems in a state of utter chaos. Things are so flexible there that it almost seems self defeating. But the brute force of privatization has revealed to me a society quite at odds with itself and out of tune.

This comparison is important in that education at all levels is reflected in this environment and the quality of education determines the future of how a nation functions.

Petra van Cronenburg's reaction to my "do we need journalists?" was predictable. Of course we need them she writes. Especially authoritative, quality journalists. Why?

Here some, selected comments, (loosely) translated from her comments section in her blog posting:

"journalists risk their lives working in hotspots, having to cope with the psychological consequences"
(the journalists who left Haiti can return to comfortable working environments whilst leaving the survivors to cope with the mess)

"why not distribute mobile phones to all citizens?" - (that is what social media, twitter etc. is all about.)

" a journalist has learned the criteria to check the truth" "he/she does not report at will, but instead, checks on propaganda content, on false information distributed on purpose and has a network of reliable contacts" (if I am taught what truth is (does it exist?) and I can use my own network of reliable = trusted, contacts, then I can judge for myself).

"the great competences of journalists...to research, find connections and background information" - which anybody can do from the comfort of their kitchen table.

"using journalistic tools" - asking the right questions to the right people in the right context...?

"they have studied the subjects of writing and research" - not everybody can be Shakespeare or Goethe.

"real professional journalism cannot be had without training, manpower, and payment".

Fundamentally, Petra is spot on. When you put on an Old Europe hat. Quality, authority, hierarchy is what I see in her comments. And while I know that she does not always think like this, there are others who do - in varying degrees of severity.

In the modern, flatter world, which is more dynamic, lively and therefore more prone to making rather big mistakes, it's different. The authority is moving elsewhere. This risks are greater, but then so are the rewards.

The critical issue is that this development we are going through, is happening too fast for the education systems to adapt to. So, let's get the journalists into the classrooms, virtual and real, and help draw up a blue print on how we will prepare future generations. Factual knowledge can be taken from the internet. It is the human spirit and values we need to teach.

Which brings me to young V. who came to me for a couple of hours this week. A teacher would have forced her to learn the grammar rules. Sadly, this is what language education is still so much about. Learn the rules and everything will fall into place.

V was given the task, by me,  to write a story based on a picture of a postcard, one of three I gave her to choose from. It shows a picture of a small town in the Provence. She had to describe what she saw, generate questions and corresponding answers and then align this to the use of her five senses. I simple theoretical structure which enables her to be creative in a different language and understand the structure. I asked her to go home and continue the story.

The result was a humorous, charming story of a typical Provencal Sunday scenario, added to which was a priest who was didn't arrive for Mass because he had suffered a heart attack running to church because he was late. I asked her to continue the story. She came up with further ideas - almost worthy of a novel, and so her homework assignment was given. And I am incredibly curious to what she will produce.

In the process, she confirmed that she knew the rules, but had not ability to apply them because the system didn't allow it. And this told me that training, teaching, tutoring - whatever you want to call it, is something which is hugely, hugely rewarding.

Journalistic tools, networks, research, evaluation, training - this the stuff we should be teaching. I am not an elitist nor am I a socialist - but there is one thing that I am observing in the "social media hype" that is out there - people are basically quite intelligent, if they are allowed and given the opportunity to be. We may not agree with it, it may not adhere to our own "quality standards" and several will find it intellectually banal. But then, we are only at the beginning of this revolution.

From my vantage point, the world of social media is driven by nations with an Anglo-American education system. I experienced this - and took from it, not knowledge in facts and figures, but where to get it and how to use it. But I also experienced 3 years of the German system - my Australian "Higher School Certificate" was not compatible with the German "Abitur". It did not meet those teutonic quality standards and I was sent to the drill room and told to learn rules. Needless to say, the German results were not as good as the Australian ones. Which impacted my later working life and now my professional life, which is viewed differently, depending in which country I am in.

Thanks Petra, let's not execute the journalists just yet. Let's just rewrite their job descriptions.

And again, I haven't said anything new. .
 

When two people look at the same object, do they see the same thing?

Up to a certain point, yes. Objectively speaking, they can describe the object, situation but after a while, an interpretation process sets in because they start incorporating the object into their own lives - differing experiences, world views, opinions. The object gradually becomes subjective.

My blog entry of two days ago prompted an interesting, and direct response, from Petra van Cronenburg in her blog. She wanted to provoke me, be horribly mean to me. In the former she succeeded, in the latter, she didn't, basically because I tend to agree with her viewpoint.

Her immediate response was that in order to generate ideas, one doesn't need news. Ideas come from all different sources, situations and permutations.

This is indeed very true.

And my slaughtering the news feeds in my reader was a reaction to my feeling that they were crowding into my thinking space - which needs to be large and empty so that I can drop all the dots onto this surface and begin to connect them.

Petra also commented on the stress of having to constantly be on the ball all the time, looking for new ideas, new inspiration. But that is what life is all about - being alive, being aware, being curious are all things which invariably keep oneself on the ball.

Petra was/is a journalist, now an (extremely good) author and she wanted to provoke me in her role as a journalist.

Given my reaction to news and news feeds, I began to ask myself, do we still need journalists?

Quite possibly not. A historian will always try to go to primary sources to learn about the past - people, documents, because only they can tell their story in the required authenticity. And this is where the "over rated and over hyped" social media world is at its highest potential.

Why do I need to read the blurb of a star allured journalist who sees the story he is supposed to report when his world view, own experiences will invariably distort the facts. Social media platforms like Facebook and blogs etc. provide the opportunity for people to report their story from their own view point, with the world view shaped by their own experiences, opinions and the use of their 5 senses. Post election Iran is a case in point - it was a start, there will be others in the future and they will grow in sophistication.

The problem is that we are still in the infancy stage and treat social media more as a playground, regretfully steered by some others who make huge amounts of money from it. But a all of these things are nothing more than mere computer platforms and there is space enough on them for all us to do our own thing, as and when we please in the fashion we want.

One central process in my daily work is to train and enable people to ask questions - and I am always surprised how difficult people find it to do this. Expressing an opinion is quick and easy - asking open ended questions a whole different ball game. Maybe one day, mainstream platforms like Facebook will evolve into a more sustainable dialogue with so called "developed"  world populations asking "developing" world populations some good questions and receiving interesting answers. And in parts, it has already happened.

Which brings me to the over hyped social media platform. A recent poll conducted by the BBC resulted in a finding that internet access should be a fundamental human right. What I tend to take for granted and get ratty about when it doesn't work - my internet access, would be absolute heaven for some communities in West Africa who see all this "hype" as a road, almost the only road, out of their personal situation. And the internet has now become a synonym for social media.

And yes, there are respected media institutions everywhere who have earned the trust and respect of many people. Petra will listen to SWR2, I tend to go for BBC Radio 4.

In a utopian world, maybe all organisations would be flat and all people would not have a job title, a rank and an image creator. We would all be the Johns, Davids, Marys of this world, doing our own thing and sharing the experience. We could sit around communal fires and swap ideas, stories and experiences. We could be just be people, and not be journalists, trainers, authors, mathematicians etc etc. But that is Utopia and we are still a long way from achieving it.

Does everything have to be new? This is a play with words. "New" is "news". New is looking forward. I could play with the German translation of news which is "Nachrichten". "Nach" as a directional proposition can be construed as looking back, old hat, yesterday. But also, at a push, looking forward. It's a mindset thing.

Have I written anything new here? No I haven't. But I have shared my thoughts which get thrown on this tapestry of life which we lead.  And it doesn't have to be new. But by being a part of this global conversation, I somehow help shape this planet.

That is why I need my open space to think, my cigar, and other ordinary people.
And if they are journalists, then so be it.
But do I need them?
No.
Do I want them?
Perhaps.

When you look at the hidden message this I-Phone commercial is sending, I can't help wondering what some parts of the world will be like in 5 years. Who will survive, who will adapt and who will go under?

 

How will service companies react, other than possibly having to publish their fees and be a whole lot more transparent?