The Hindu Business Line : The ‘mystery’ side of business

Laying out detailed plans is fine, but sitting back thinking that things will neatly unfold as per your calculations is not advisable. “Never fool yourself that things will always tie themselves up into easily memorable prescriptions, or that promises will come true,” caution Rene Carayol and David Firth in Corporate Voodoo ( www.wileyindia.com ). “Life’s a mess. Adapt. Make it up.”

Change the world by all means, they say. “But you’ll only know how to do that by having an intimate and constantly updated understanding of how it currently seems to work — what currently seems to drive it, and what it appears to be lacking.” Delve deep to find what really makes the difference, for you and then for others, and focus there, advise Carayol and Firth.

The book looks at the ‘mystery’ side of business: ‘the secret knowledge — natural, instinctual, risky, thrilling, scary — that a few people are practising today.’

Not for the timid!

Zeroes beneath zeroes

Can pain be measured on a zero-to-ten scale? This is the question that occupies the mind of Eula Biss. Sitting in a hospital, and trying to measure pain, she does a mini research of zero.

“Zero, on the Celsius scale, is the point at which water freezes. And one hundred is the point at which water boils. But Anders Celsius, who introduced the scale in 1741, originally fixed zero as the point at which water boiled, and one hundred as the point at which water froze. These fixed points were reversed only after his death,” reads a snatch from her essay, included in Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Non-fiction: Work from 1970 to the present edited by Lex Williford and Michael Martone ( www.landmarkonthenet.com ).

“There is only one fixed point on the Kelvin scale — absolute zero,” continues Biss. “Absolute zero is 273 degrees Celsius colder than the temperature at which water freezes. There are zeroes beneath zeroes. Absolute zero is the temperature at which molecules and atoms are moving as slowly as possible. But even at absolute zero, their motion does not stop completely. Even the absolute is not absolute. This is comforting, but it does not give me faith in zero.”

Prose of interest.

Watching business

In this ‘age of violence’ is public order harder to maintain? “Plainly governments and businesses think so,” writes Eric Hobsbawm in Globalisation, Democracy and Terrorism ( www.littlebrown.co.uk ). For instance, “The size of police forces in Britain has gone up by 35 per cent since 1971; and for every ten thousand citizens at the end of the century there were 34 police officers as against 24.4 thirty years earlier (that’s more than 40 per cent up).” In addition, there are an estimated ‘half a million employed in the security industry as guards and the like — a sector of the economy that has multiplied over the past 30 years since Securicor felt big enough in 1971 to get a stock exchange quotation.

There were about 2,500 firms in the industry last year.’
The de-industrialisation of Britain has produced a large number of able-bodied men for whom getting a job as a security guard is one of the few available forms of employment, reasons Hobsbawm. “One might say that the economy, instead of being based on taking in one another’s washing, may one day rest on the mass employment of people taking on one another’s watching,” he wryly adds.
Tailpiece
“He sounded so aggressive when talking about mergers and acquisitions that…”
“Oh…”
“I seemed to hear ‘murders’ rather than ‘mergers’!”

D. MURALI

http://BookPeek.blogspot.com

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The ‘mystery’ side of business