Author: Mark Hannam

When I was in my mid-teens, I watched a tv programme that presented a humorous view of suburban Britain, set around twenty-five years into the future. Two-and-half decades forward is an interesting time to speculate about, being close enough for most things to be roughly similar, but far enough ahead for some things to have changed significantly.  I recall that in the tv show there were some jokes about the improved taste of instant food and the widespread use of robot teachers at school, but neither of the two young people who were the focus of the programme had a mobile phone, which is perhaps the most visible lifestyle change that – in fact – occurred between the years when I was fifteen and forty.

One scene that has stayed with me, was a shot of the two teenagers walking down a street that was littered with rubbish, the sky busy with helicopters from which bundles of coloured papers were being thrown to the people below.  It was a time when bulk mail, as it was then called, had just started: in addition to letters, magazines, and the like, that were personally addressed to my parents – and, very occasionally, letters addressed to me – we would receive impersonal advertising material through our letterbox, usually promoting products for sale at a local store or supermarket.  These were delivered to every house in the street, sometimes with the mail and sometimes separately, as part of a blanket advertising campaign.  The tv show had imagined a vast increase in impersonal adverts, thrown directly into the streets from marketing vehicles in the air.  The idea seemed ludicrous, but at the same time a little worrying: surely, we would never allow bulk mail drops on this scale, creating vast amounts of unread and unwanted street litter.

Continue reading “Junk mail”

Driving around the countryside of Co Donegal, occasionally I will pass a temporary sign that says, Wake in Progress.  The quiet, winding lanes will be full of parked cars and vans, as the local community come to pay their respects at the former home of the departed.  The tradition of holding a wake – the time between death and burial, when friends and relatives sit and wait beside the corpse of the deceased, a period of reflection, a remembrance but also a celebration – has declined across much of Western Europe but remains commonplace in Ireland.  I imagine that today most wakes are decorous, but that has not always been the case.  There is a famous Irish song from the mid-nineteenth century about Tim Finnegan, who fell off a ladder when drunk, breaking his skull.  During the wake held at his house, an argument broke out, which turned into a fight, during which a bottle of whiskey was thrown, broke and spilled over his prostrate body, at which point he sprang back to life, saying: Thunderin’ blazes! You think I’m dead?   Excess whiskey was the cause of Tim’s apparent death and so too his return to life.

This paradox was, no doubt, why the song lyric appealed to James Joyce, who borrowed the revenant’s name for his final masterpiece: Finnegans Wake.  In this book, for some time known as Work in Progress, which takes the form of an extended series of philosophical reflections blended with multiple digressions, wordplay and jokes, there is repeated suggestion that what begins must end and what ends must begin again, that what rises will fall and that what falls will rise again, and that all of life is repetition and recycling.  Joyce spoke several languages and enjoyed inventing words that were combinations of elements from different tongues.  The name Finnegan can be decomposed into fin, the French for end, and egan a homonym for again in English: Finnegans means, therefore, to end again and again.  The word Wake might suggest the noun that means the ceremony of remembrance for the dead, or it might suggest the command that means wake up!  His title, therefore, combines ideas of both death and life.  These themes of circularity and continuity are emphasised throughout the text of the book, which starts and ends mid-sentence – the same sentence, Joyce claimed – and which is promiscuous with grammar as well as language, spelling, and narrative structure.  

Continue reading “Awake”

We were twelve in number – six executives and six non-executives – and we had spent the last five hours in a spacious conference room in Vauxhall, on a hot and humid June afternoon, discussing aspects of the company’s strategy for the next three years.  As the meeting came to an end, and the prospect of dinner together at a nearby Eritrean restaurant came into view, as Chair of the meeting, I brought the formal proceedings to a close.  “Let’s take a few minutes”, I said, “before we leave for our meal, to decompose”.   My words provoked some amusement among my colleagues: “Do you mean decompress?”  “Do you want us to turn to compost?”  On the contrary, I had meant exactly what I had said.  At the start of a Board meeting, each attendee should compose themselves, making ready to come together as a group to do the difficult work of governance; at the end of the meeting, each should feel free to decompose, to return to their constituent self, and allow time for individual relaxation and rest. 

“What do you do at Board meetings,” one of my friends asked me recently, “apart from eating sandwiches?”  In the boardroom, as elsewhere, there is no such thing as a free lunch.  Governance is a specialised form of work, and to do it well takes lengthy preparation time, high levels of concentration, the employment of good listening and discursive skills, and the ability and willingness to develop collective recommendations in a constructive and collegiate manner.  This is not easy work and should be undertaken with the serious and responsible mindset that the task demands.  The Board is ultimately responsible – legally and morally – for the oversight of the company, the effective deployment of the resources at its disposal, and for securing the interests of various groups of stakeholders, including investors, staff, customers, suppliers, and the wider community.  Good Board meetings require all participants to come to the table primed and prepared to do this work. 

Continue reading “Decomposed”

As I have grown older, I notice that I am reading more biographies.  I do not wholly understand why this is so.  In some recent cases, for example a biography of Goethe, it is because I am now more familiar with his prodigious literary output and his influence on his contemporaries than when I was younger, and therefore am now better able to understand his importance.  In other cases, for example a biography of Charles V, it is because the years when he was the Habsburg emperor encompassed several historical events about which I already knew a little and with which he was centrally involved – the German Reformation, Henry of England’s divorce, the Spanish invasion of Central America, the growth of Turkish power in the Eastern Mediterranean.  In the case of Goethe, reading about the life helps make sense of the work, in the case of Charles, knowing about the combination of momentous events helps make sense of his life. 

There is perhaps another reason, which has to do with the widespread human predisposition to tell stories as a means of explanation.  I am a little suspicious of arguments based primarily on narrative examples, as if hard facts were not relevant to the process of persuasion.  Contrariwise, I recognise the value of stories in bringing the facts, once established, to life.  The plural of anecdote is not data, but evidence in aggregate does not move us in the same was as narrated particularities do.  To understand the world in the fullest sense we need numbers and words, graphs and pictures, and data and stories.  Biographies are ideal vehicles for story telling because they are framed around the familiar human pattern of birth, life, and death.  As I have become older, the importance of this frame has become more intelligible, hence biographies more interesting.

Continue reading “Three lives”

When I worked in mainstream finance, I came across a lot of people (men, mostly) with big-sounding job titles and hefty salaries to match.  Frequently, they would claim, or at least imply, with great confidence that their success was evidence of the meritocratic nature of the financial services industry: they were smart, they had worked hard, their efforts had been recognised and rewarded.  As things go in milk-making, so they go in business: the cream naturally rises to the top.  Once, I was foolish enough to say to my CEO that the problem with senior managers at our firm was that all the people at the top thought they owed their position to merit but almost no-one who worked for them shared that view.  I added that this was also true in most comparable firms.  I doubt my career trajectory improved after that conversation, but it was probably already too late.  Nonetheless, I still stand by what I said then: if you really want to know how good a manager is, don’t ask them, talk to their junior staff instead. 

Mohandas Gandhi was once asked his opinion about Western civilization, and replied, “I think it would be a very good idea”, which nicely sums up my view about meritocracy.  What we have in the West is a system that encourages people at the top to believe they deserve to be there, without paying much attention to whether there is any evidence to support that belief.  We are born with nothing and we die with nothing (the Book of Job reminds us), so we convince ourselves that what we make of our lives is down to us, and that consequently we should bear responsibility for our failures and take credit for our successes.  Except that we are not born into nothing: we are born into a complex socio-economic world, which supplies advantages to some and disadvantages to others, and what we are able to make of our lives is significantly constrained by the place of our birth, our sex organs and skin colour, and the attitude our parents take towards our education.

Continue reading “Lucky, lucky, lucky”