Yesterday I flew with what is possibly the worst run airline in the world. The flight was late, of course, they didn’t say what was going on until the very last minute and once on board they started the flight saying that they didn’t have any change and would customers please give them some. The flight back from Milan wasn’t any better. A delay again, this time one largely caused by the fact that passengers in Gatwick were bringing more than one bag on to the plane, which then had to be moved into the hold. Yes, but if you policed the bag limit at the gate you wouldn’t have to do that, would you? Goodness me, it’s not exactly rocket science is it.

Anyway, the silver lining in the cloud of incompetency was that I was more than able to catch up with a bit of reading. Here is a little snippet from the New York Times.

The Japanese writer Haruki Murakami has written that reality is now weirder than fiction – a thought echoed by William Burroughs recently I seem to recall. He (Murakami) writes: “Let’s call the world we actually have now Reality A and the world we might have had if 9/11 had never happened Reality B. Then we can’t help but notice that the world of Reality B appears to be more rational than the world of Reality A. To put it in different terms, we are living in a world that has an even lower level of reality than the unreal world.”

I think this fellow may be onto something….

Have you noticed the amount of garden Buddha statues around recently? Most seem to be made from cheap concrete. They seem to be the 2009 equivalent of garden gnomes or plastic pink flamingos. What does this represent I wonder?

At last. The new book is done. That’s the good news. I can now get issue 23 of What’s Next out (next week, maybe the week after that) and catch-up with some issues of brainmail. I think I’m about 4 months behind with brainmail. Crikey.The bad news is that I’ve done something really bad to my back. Probably caused by me sitting too close to computer screen for 12-months, banging my head on my desk, shouting #FϷ´®¥â„¢£¢5w6***** (it was the book!).

So, today, I have mostly been… lying on my back, on the floor, trying to read various newspaper and magazines articles held above my head. I now have arm muscles like Godzilla. Pick of the day?  An article in the Harvard Business Review called Why Teams Don’t Work (by Diane Coutu). Basically, teams under perform due to problems surrounding motivation and co-ordination. Teams usually have the wrong people in them, they get changed too often and they are far too large. The ideal size is less then 10 people. In my experience it’s actually 8 because that’s the maximum you can comfortably get around a dinner table.

Second, some research by Queensland University of Technology about risks of open-plan offices, published in the Asia-Pacific Journal of Health Management (hint: open-plan offices are bad for productivity, bad for privacy, increase workplace conflict and raise blood pressure. Otherwise they’re a really good idea!!!).

Third, an article in The Futurist magazine (US) about ten forces driving business futures. US centric but a good read nevertheless. Fourth, something from Wired magazine about the plot to kill Google and finally, an article from Time magazine about twitter. Totally under whelming — both the article and Twitter.

PS — Don’t eat lunch upside down. It doesn’t work.

Busy week. Trying to finish off the new book, which has been painful.

Got an email from a large Swiss pharmaceuticals company a few days ago asking whether I’d like to go to Prague to talk to them about Macro-trends. I said yes, but then they moved the cheese. I’ll probably end up in Melbourne now instead. Then I got asked about Arizona. Ummm..?

Meanwhile, the best brief I’ve ever received landed on my desk by way of a letter (remember those?). Would I like to go away somewhere really remote to think about the future of water and not come back until I’ve got an answer? I said I’d think about it.

As you may know, when it comes to the economy, especially in Asia, I’m on the side of the economic optimists. I’m at the “they think it’s all over —it is now” end of the spectrum on the recession, especially in places like Australia. But not everyone that I speak with agrees with me and what some people are saying is quite compelling.

Autumn – or fall — in the northern hemisphere is traditionally the time when stock markets fall – like lead weights. Since 1929, September has always been the worst month for US stocks and let’s not forget what happened in September 2007. October isn’t much better historically either. Why the seasonal gloom? One reason is probably that it’s the month that companies start to admit that their full year profit forecasts aren’t looking too good.

Another reason is probably that as the days get shorter and the nights get bleaker investor sentiments turn to doomsday scenarios. Chatting with a few bankers it appears that recent improvements in earnings have largely been a result of cost cutting and de-leveraging rather than any genuine improvement in sales. This is one reason to be cautious.

Another reason is that large companies are still finding it difficult to get funding and without secure funding there is the possibility that they will fall over. And, of course, consumers and governments around the world are still debt laden, interest rates look like they will rise and unemployment isn’t looking too pretty in some regions either.

On balance I’m still optimistic that Asia is out of the recession and that the rest of the world will follow suit in due course. But then again:

I’ve seen the future and it works. I’ve just got back from Singapore. I’ve been doing a series of workshops for the likes of Procter & Gamble and Cadbury Schweppes based around some of the content from my book.

Singapore is interesting. The place has always made me feel slightly uneasy but I am starting to wonder whether it isn’t a model of what a future city might look like. Let me explain.

Half the people in the world now live in cities but a large proportion of these cities don’t work because the infrastructure can’t cope with the amount of people and so on. Part of the problem is that democratically elected governments won’t commit to any new idea or policy (e.g. a major infrastructure improvement) that doesn’t deliver benefits during the term of the government. Hence ideas become ridiculously short term, ridiculously small and ridiculously parochial. And, to make matters worse, all major policy ideas are deferred to focus groups before anyone will decide anything. The overall result, it seems to me, is either no decisions whatsoever or a watering down of any idea that is faintly courageous.

But we all know what focus groups are like. Half the time they are comprised of men and women taken off the street because, quite frankly, anyone with half a brain a) isn’t wandering around aimlessly on the street and b) anyone with half a brain wandering the streets wouldn’t agree to go along to something as dim witted as a focus group even if you paid them. By and large focus groups empower the incapable.

You can probably see where I’m going with this. I’m not going to get into a political critique of Singapore and I’m certainly not arguing that anything is acceptable just as long as the trains run on time. Not at all. All I am saying is that in some respects a new system other that pure democracy might be needed.

For example, what if governments – especially city governments – were given 10 or 20 years to run things rather than 4 or 5? What if, once elected, they could stay there unless they abused their power or infringed some agreed ethical code?

Apparently, Obama’s top economic adviser (Larry Summers) says the US is approaching the end of recession based on the number of Google searches for the term “economic depression.” This chimes with a story I read about a few months ago (but now can’t find) saying that Google thought the recession was over due to shifts in what people were searching for (they are starting to search for luxury goods again, for example).

What are some of the other less obvious economic indicators? I always liked the story of Warren Buffet following sales of cardboard because this tracked the shipping of goods (i.e. purchases) and I’m also a fan of how difficult it is to get a taxi in the rain and how easy it is to get a table at a top restaurant on a Saturday night. Given that supermarkets like Tesco are sitting on millions of bits of data about what people are buying/have stopped buying you’d think they are in a pretty good position to judge too.