Vanity Fair this month has a great article titled “Microsoft’s lost decade”. It describes how the corporate giant lost its way and changed from being an indomitable technology Titan to a has-been. Just as IBM did a decade earlier. The reason? A management technique known as “stack ranking”. Every business unit had to rank a certain percentage of its employees as “top performers”, “average” or “poor” and this effectively crippled the company’s ability to innovate. In contrast, Apple (for decades underdog to Microsoft) generates more revenue with a single product  – the iPhone – than the whole of Microsoft...

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 I spent last night watching the Eurovision Song Contest. What a hoot! So much better than X Factor or any of the other dreary  karaoke contests that clog our screens these days. The highlights for me were:     1.The moonwalking bagpipe player in a white “body condom” outfit     2.Russian grannies chanting while baking cookies, cunningly arranged in height like a set of dolls.  So cute that you just want to stack them inside  each other and put them on your mantelpiece.     3.A howlingly dissonant Albanian with a choux puff on her head    ...

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I am just back from a trip to Zimbabwe, exchanging the bold blue African sky for London’s grey misery. This April has been the wettest in the UK since records began with 152 different parts of the country currently on flood alert. Ironically, there is still a hosepipe ban in force, because the six preceding months saw an extreme drought. The Environment Agency says that groundwater levels will only be properly replenished by large and consistent amounts of steady rain for two months. Welcome to our British Spring! This is not a new story. In fact, it is a...

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This morning is the first day back at work after the Easter break. Having overindulged on chocolate eggs on the weekend, I decide to get some exercise and walk to my Mayfair office from London Bridge station. As a result, I happen to be passing the Tate Modern as they open and pop in to see the Damian Hirst show on impulse. There is a huge queue for tickets but no queue or tickets required to see the ‘diamond skull’. The whole of the huge turbine hall is given over for the display of this one tiny piece. But...

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When you think of evolution what image first springs to mind? It’s probably a hall in the Natural History Museum filled with fossils. All the dinosaurs, trilobites, coelacanths and ammonites together make an awesome menagerie of extinct creatures. The stepping stones of evolution are laid out before you in rock and bone. But there is something wrong with this picture – it’s just depicting animal evolution which means it is only telling part of the story. There are five other kingdoms of life (plants, fungi, protozoa, bacteria and archaea) and animals showed up relatively recently. Life on Earth started...

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Recent research from Collins Stewart, a UK stockbroker, shows that investment trusts have comprehensively outperformed open ended funds over the last 10 years. These funds are rarely recommended by financial advisers since they don’t pay commissions (i.e. kickbacks) to the IFA’s who promote them. In major markets, Investment Trusts gave investors a 106% return while unit trusts only returned 36%. In emerging markets, the difference was even greater: 357% vs 230%. OK. So maybe the last time someone tried to explain the difference between an Investment Trust and a Unit Trust to you, you edged away and went to...

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I am experimenting with Apple’s Keynote software (their alternative to the dreaded Powerpoint) to produce a You Tube channel of Catataxis Blipverts. See below and tell me what you think :    

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Most Western countries are having the same economic debate at the moment: austerity or stimulus? Britain’s coalition government, Germany and the Tea Party in the USA want more austerity. The logic is simple. If you have too much debt then you should stop spending. But the counter argument goes like this: government cutbacks depress the economy, recessions mean less tax revenues which mean more cutbacks. The result is an ever decreasing spiral like the one in Greece where the economy is shrinking 5% a year. So governments should be spending to stimulate the economy and worry about balancing the...

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How sad that on the centenary of the Titanic disaster of 1912 another huge cruse ship should sink. It may be insensitive to be grandstanding and pontificating at a time of tragedy, but one of the causes of the Costa Concordia disaster is catataxis. As cruse liners have ballooned in size, the safety systems have not scaled up appropriately. In this case, more of the same is not just different but also deadly. Cruise ships have been a boom industry and as a result the ships have got bigger and bigger in order to achieve economies of scale. Today’s...

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I was saddened to hear of Ken Russell’s death last week. He was a particular hero of mine. I saw my first Ken Russell film at boarding school. It was introduced by a wimpy teacher, wringing his hands and describing the intense, moralistic debate the school board had just had about whether it was appropriate to screen this movie. After 10 minutes of this gentle, concerned bleating, he finally left the stage. The projector cranked up and a hall full of schoolboys got their first exposure to a work by The Master: it was The Devils. Wow ! What...

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A confusion between hierarchical levels [Gr. Kata= down or through, taxis = arrangement, order]

accounting Adam Tofilski altruism apple brand catataxis cell centrifugal governor Churchill DNA EU Forelius pusillus FSA Full Metal Jacket Hawking Hayflick Inception catataxis Keats Krakow University Kyrgyzstan leafcutter ants M-Theory macro prudential McChrystal money nation oil Pink Floyd R.Lee Ermey regulation Robert Kaplan Rolling Stones Roma Skloot steam engine sugarbabes suicide super organism telomere The grand design Vietnam War water winston Wittgenstein zero