Sorry for the radio silence but I’ve been in Paris for a week doing some work and reveling in the joys of disconnection (i.e. I gave my ancient GF4 Powerbook to someone recently and I can’t decide whether to replace it with a Macbook Air or an iPad).

Anyway, two discoveries. First, my zero email tranquility was enhanced by the fact that I didn’t read any newspapers for the week either.

Second, I am totally in love with Paris (Sorry Greece). Something about the aesthetic pleasure mixed up with civility and pace. Anyway, if you are in Paris anytime soon check out a restaurant called Les Cocottes Christian Constant. It’s possibly the best little restaurant in Paris.

I’ve just been to New York and was lucky enough to get whisked through a private security channel at Heathrow. This was obviously so that I didn’t get caught up with the chaos elsewhere in the airport. I presume that somewhere in the airport – probably most airports – are routes that are more discreet.

I think this is to some extent analogous with the world these days. There are people that get whisked and there are people that don’t. There are the wiskees and the whiskers. One group zooms around barely noticing the struggle that’s going on. They don’t see – or choose not to see – the crumbling infrastructure, the queues, the overcrowding, the things that don’t work and the sheer cost of everything.

For these people (the whiskees) it’s a quiet, high-speed, interconnected world where money buys you time and space. For everyone else, life is loud, slow and constantly interrupted by everything from the weather to small incidents of rage.

So the question is, at what point do these small incidents turn into something bigger? At what point do you create a revolutionized economic middle class?

“Every year is getting shorter never seem to find the time. 
Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines. 
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way. 
The time is gone, the song is over.  
Thought I’d something more to say.”

When it comes to the adoption of new technology, (eg, robotics and digital money), Japan is usually ahead of other countries. It’s also leading the trend demographically. The rapid ageing of Japanese society is a sign of things to come for regions like Europe. Japanese firms are now fighting to keep hold of retirees as labour shortages start to really bite.

Another new trend in Japan – which is also emerging in the US – is the huge boom in emergency kits and so-called FUD (Fear Uncertainty and Doubt) products. These are products such as mobile phones and radios that can be manually charged (i.e. wound up) and emergency survival products such as cookers and water filters. For example, one of the big sellers in Tokyo currently is a series of maps to help you find your way home after an earthquake.

Why is everyone so angry ? Why is grim survivalism the current zeitgeist? To quote a leader in the Financial Times a few years ago, it might be that “The ‘nice’ decade – for Non-Inflationary Continuous Expansion – is behind us”. In other words we, in the West, are entering a nasty period where economic anxiety is becoming a catalyst for all kinds of attitudinal and behavioural shifts.

For example, the real issue might not be peoples’ anger per se but the increasing number of people and events that provoke the anger that lies under the surface. This can range from traffic jams and bad customer service to falling house prices, increasing food and energy costs and the economic rise of the BRICs. If the economy really turns sour people in places like London and New York will be screaming for protection from the likes of Dubai and Moscow. In other words, economic issues will bring nationalist attitudes to the fore much in the same way that racism and patriotism grew during the 1930s depression.

You can see this anger already in the form of ‘Wrath Lit’ on the shelves of your local bookstore (OK, those have gone so try Amazon). But is the world really getting more angry or is it simply that the likes of camera phones and YouTube are making more of us aware of incidences of anger?

Put slightly differently, the way to create an epidemic of something like anger is simply to use the word in politics or the media. Another explanation for the rage trend is that in many societies anger is a badge of honour. It is seen as a virtue. It is the individual being true to themselves and expressing their feelings. Well bottle it up buddy because you are making the rest of us anxious.

In closing it is probably worth mentioning Elizabeth Kuber-Ross’s five point model of how people deal with death. Stage 1 is disbelief, stage 2 is yearning, stage 3 is anger, stage 4 is depression and stage 5 is acceptance. Is it possible that societally (in the West) we are looking at what we think is an abyss (i.e. economic recession, global warming, the rise of China and so on) and are reacting in exactly the same way as if we were facing terminal illness or the death of a loved one. We are currently in the collective anger stage, falling into depression.

But soon we will adjust and accept whatever the new normal is.

Psycho what? Psychological neotency is a theory developed by Professor Bruce Charlton at the University of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne (UK) that says that the increased level of immaturity among adults is an evolutionary response to increased change and uncertainty.

This initially sounds like a ridiculous suggestion, but it does make a certain amount of sense if you stop to consider the argument. Humanity has long held youth in high esteem, originally because it was a sign of fertility and health, which were important prerequisites for hunting and reproduction. In ‘fixed’ environments, psychological maturity was useful because it indicated experience and wisdom.

However, sometime in the latter part of the past century, child-like youthfulness started to have a new function which was to remain adaptive to a changing environment. In other words, if jobs, skills, and technology are all in a state of flux it is important to remain open-minded about learning new skills – and the best way to do this is to retain a child-like state of receptivity and cognitive flexibility.

Previously the phenomenon of adults behaving like children has been seen as a negative trend, but it may not be such a bad thing after all. For example, retaining the adolescent attitudes and behaviour of youth (for example, short attention spans or novelty seeking) could be seen as essential prerequisites for innovators.

Equally, there is a significant amount of evidence to suggest that the most creative thinkers in modern society are ‘immature’ compared to historical precedents. Of course this theory also justifies lying around watching MTV and eating donuts, so perhaps more research is required. The only problem is who should do it – mature professors or immature students?

Here’s something to make your heart beat faster. I was at a conference last week about data security and one of the issues that’s starting to get talked about is denial of service attacks on implanted medical devices. Yikes!

I got a friend of mine, Douglas, to write this for me more than ten years ago. It’s been sitting in a file. Reading it now it’s as though it was written in another century, which, of course, it was…

Nobody likes Filing. Do they? Surely not. You couldn’t.

Filing is a fundamental source of office jokes, in every office, everywhere in the universe. “I haven’t done my Filing for so long, there’s a bacon-and-dinosaur-egg sandwich halfway down the heap.” “We call our long-term fossil-fuel reserve the Filing.”

It is also the oldest office reproach and scourge. “And when are you going to tackle the Filing?” Worse still: “And when are you going to do my Filing?”

That “And…” gives the game away. It is a warning that the Filing is – as well as an offence in itself – the indefensible charge in a long list of misdemeanours. The Filing is always there as a sin of omission. It is the fly in the ointment of your annual appraisal. It is the function that is never going to be more-than-adequately fulfilled – with an in-built tendency to failure.

It is also a key indicator of office status, marking the fault-lines in the office class wars. Offices split into three classes: those who do someone else’s Filing, those who do their own, and those who have someone to do theirs. Flattening the structure – in modern jargon – simply means that we all do our own. (Ha! Ha! Except the Boss.)

You cannot do Filing and have a key to the Executive Washroom.

Filing says a lot about the efficiency-versus-size quotient of an office. In the good old days, when Bob Cratchit sat at his high desk in a starched collar, there were perhaps offices – though certainly not Mr Scrooge’s – where there were enough clerks to get the filing done, in office hours. Old-fashioned solicitors had japanned deed boxes for clients’ papers. (There was also a lot less paper.)

Nowadays an office with enough people to keep on top of the Filing is almost certainly Over-Staffed, according to current thinking. If it is a commercial organisation, it is surely ripe for a takeover, and efficiency savings under new management. If it is a public office, it must be ruthlessly re-structured and down-sized, before the newspapers find out about such monstrous waste of public resources.

But nowadays – and also however – everyone is too busy doing new business to clear up the old business. And that is in a good office. In most offices, everyone is too busy fighting today’s fires to shift the mounds of paper that yesterday’s crises generated.

The trouble is, those mounds of paper can suddenly burst into flame – metaphorically, if not actually. Something suddenly comes alive, and a piece of paper is Needed. The Authorities arrive with vans, and everything is boxed, and taken away for an Investigation; and no-one knows what was there. No-one even knows what might have been better going into the shredder…

So why do we file? Why should we file? What should we file? What do we get from the misery, and what do we lose by not enduring it. Might we even enjoy it? Untangle those questions, answer them and absorb the answers, and perhaps we learn something.

First off, the simple purpose of it, we file things because we may – or will – need them later. Probably in a hurry. At a very busy time.

So it is the aim of a good filing system to be organised in such a way that we can put our hands on something without remembering exactly where we put it. That means it has to have a coherent and comprehensible structure – which will accord with how the question of where we put something presents itself, as much as how the problem of where we are going to put it presents itself at the moment when we are trying to shift this pile of decomposing wood-pulp off our desks immediately after the Office Nag has finally forced us into doing so…

That use of italics is significant. The great academic discipline which uses italics in this way is philosophy. And Filing is philosophy. Decisions about where to put something in a structure, so that questions match up with previous answers, are essentially philosophical. They are also contingent.

While there are universal principles involved in Filing, each organisation ideally needs its own system. The reason for that is that each organisation is different: not merely a logical structure (if only!), but also a unique organism.

That is why Filing – or, rather, complete control of the filing system – usually and ultimately belongs, in any organisation and if it does at all, to the immensely respected, but formally lowly-graded (although at the very top of all the gradings conceivably available to her) PA to the CEO, who will retire any year now – when she will no longer yield to being beseeched on bended knee to stay on – with a national honour, like the OBE. This will have been obtained for her by the CEO and Chairman, after hours of formal representations – typed by the CEO’s wife, or sometimes (yes) by the putative recipient herself – and much informal lobbying of Ministers at official dinners, whenever any Minister is so unwise as to come within reach of either of them.

Why the concerted attack on the Honours System, on Her behalf? Because She – and her knowledge of the Filing System – represents the essential short-term memory of the organisation. That is how – and why – the CEO (and/or Chairman) can stay in control. She is, to that extent, the organisation: because, through the Filing, and through that Short-Term Memory, She gives it continuous personality, so that it can be known, and stroked, and disciplined, and preserved.

And if the Chairman and the CEO don’t get her a gong, they’ll never find anyone as good, and as dedicated, to replace her. Simple – if complex – economics. Especially in a world where CEOs and Chairmen come and go in a revolving door of executive mobility.

That is the point of Filing. Memory is Power. Why do computers have Random-Access-Memory? Because it is the thing that turns them from counting machines into (still relatively inefficient) simulacra of the Human Brain. Before computers, there was only Filing.

And Filing still reigns supreme.

This brings us onto the paperless office.

Fine. Say most things come in electronically. Say the system never goes down. Say any piece of paper that does come in can be scanned in as much time as it takes to open an envelope. Still the decisions remain.

Important to keep, or to discard? (Filing in the appropriate – the circular – receptacle?) Where to keep it, if it is to be kept? It is just as frustrating to hammer a keyboard in vain, looking for something lost in cyberspace, as it is to rifle through filing cabinets.

The decision of Where To File is philosophical – or, more precisely, casuistical. That is – to look beyond the vulgar dictionary distrust of casuistry – it involves the resolving of problems by the application of principles to particular instances. Filing is of the essence of casuistry. And vice versa.

Such fine judgments depend on the deepest possible understanding of the organisation concerned, and its stated principles and purposes. For databases must be set up. This involves the conceptualisation of what the organisation does, and what it does and does not need to record, whether for internal or external (legal and regulatory) purposes.

And then, when that Herculean labour has been accomplished, Filing demands that an individual decision is taken with regard to each piece of material entering the office. First, whether to keep it. Secondly, and if so, where to File it. Or thirdly, sometimes, desperately: whether it represents a need for a whole new category in The System.

That last calls the whole philosophical basis of the enterprise into question. So it is often ducked. And the Thing may be shoved into the nearest file – electronic or actual – that seems plausible. That is, it is misfiled. Whereas actually the Thing – and the difficulty of Filing It – may in fact represent the very first indication of a need for the organisation to change, to meet a new world outside…

Now do you see the need – and the challenge of – Filing?

Or where should we File this?

Does anyone know any experts, ideally academics, in game theory? I’m also looking for an expert in Red Team thinking from a non-defence perspective.

6 million workers in the UK do not take lunch breaks according to a study by BUPA, a health insurance company. 34% say this is because of pressure from managers, while 50% say it’s due to excessive workloads.

48% also say that without lunch their productivity drops around 3.00 pm, which leads to 40-minutes lost work worth around £50 million per day in lost productivity.

So time to roll this essay out once again…

Lunch. Let’s do lunch. Let’s skip lunch. Lunch is for wimps. It is fourteen years since Gordon Gekko made that last infamous announcement and yet ‘lunch’ is still a dirty word.

We need to eat; but we seem also to need to justify the time spent doing it. Sometimes we sit alone at our computer while we wolf a sandwich (extra points if purchased from an entrepreneur with a basket actually in the office). Sometimes we snatch a bite while we rush round doing the domestic errands that will allow us to stay later that night. Sometimes we miss lunch altogether: we jog to burn up calories (the absolute opposite); or we go to the gym to work out (work up?) aggression before plunging back into the dog eat dog marketplace. Anything, anything but simply having lunch and enjoying it.

Why? When, indeed, eating in the middle of the day is a natural and healthy moment to do so – sustaining energy, allowing digestion and feeding conversation.

It is an Anglo-Saxon phenomenon, broadly speaking. Further south, societies have a stronger tradition of eating, and then resting, in the middle of the day. The day starts earlier, is broken by some hours in the afternoon, and then goes on later into the evening. The anthropological explanation of this is climatic: it is the heat which dictates, not the digestion. Except that, now that Anglo-Saxon capitalism is dominant, in city after European city the habit is beginning to die, as desks must be staffed until Tokyo has gone to bed and New York has woken up. Global capitalism has overridden variations in the global climate.

This new capitalism is lean, mean and very hungry. Back in the bad old days, when socialist sensitivities were keen, business lunches possibly earned a bad name. Fat cat capitalists sat late into the afternoon over brandy and cigars, while their workers toiled in satanic mills, only emerging late in the afternoon with pale, hungry faces and emaciated limbs.

But now bosses are thinner than shop-floor workers – they can afford more expensive gyms – and brandy and cigars. Business entertaining goes on, but water is the order of the ambitious lunchtime drinker, and the lunch – notoriously never free – must be justified by a concrete deal, a bottom line, a result.

Meals are significant social moments in all cultures. Meals have always attracted rituals and meanings. They used to be far more simply and recognisably significant in our own culture. The directors would have lunch in their own dining room, and would invite others to join them. Banks, shops and offices would close for lunch. Lunch was important. And it was important throughout the week. Sunday lunch involved all the family sitting down. Christmas dinner still does. In America there is Thanksgiving. In church there is the Eucharist, the Mass, the Holy Communion, The Lord’s Supper … meals are where we find much that is significant about how we live, what is changing, what is enduring.

Lunch is an interface. Lunch is where work meets people (where colleagues became friends before the days of motivational workshops and team bonding courses). Lunch is where people talk and people think. It is where the new economy meets a very ancient set of rituals and customs. How we approach lunch says a lot about our attitude to work, and work’s attitude towards us.

Lunch has been on a long downhill trek – from luncheon to something, which we snatch, shamefaced, alone. So what have we gained by downgrading lunch? What have we lost?

“I’m going for lunch.” Yes, but are you going for lunch to eat; or are you going to do the things that you do instead of lunching? In one sense the latter could be said to be fraudulent because this hiatus in the working day is there in order that the natural human need to eat should be met. But on the other hand we don’t want to eat. So we have turned lunch into something else, something broader – time out during the working day. And so employers negotiate about how long ‘lunch’ – and other breaks – should be.
Is the time taken at the employee’s expense, or the employer’s? If it is just used by the employee at will, then cannot employers reasonably argue that it should not count towards the working day? If it is used to eat, because an eight- or ten-hour stretch without food involves significant loss of efficiency towards the end, then cannot an employee regard that as benefiting the organisation? Lunch, in those circumstances, becomes a necessary concomitant of employing people at all – and the employer’s business.

This is lunch as a battleground. It suggests a workplace that is a battlefield. Investment banks are the new sweatshops, as much as the new call centres – only with bigger bonuses. So that’s all right then? In a free market and a free society people are able to choose what they do with the time when they could be eating. That canteen, lunch-break culture was so paternalistic, so patronising. Yet now market pressures seem to work only one way. They have eaten up lunch for the keen employee. Modern business culture has become as food-friendly as a plague of locusts.

Historically, many communities dedicated to a common end have distrusted meals. Under the Rule of St Benedict monks eat in silence, listening to readings from improving texts. (When do the readers eat? But then, when do waiters have lunch?)

The trouble is, eating is so charged. Rows over the family table. Class war fought with serried ranks of cutlery and fish servers. Meals are the traditional moment to betray your enemy under the guise of friendship: the invitation to break bread speaks of peace, but treachery often strikes. Dante puts traitors to their guests into the very lowest Hell.
It is a busy place.

And yet, we should nevertheless try to reclaim lunch for the new economy. Because, what is wrong with eating? Can’t we simply enjoy that necessary break in the working day, make a virtue out of the necessity, feed ourselves, replenish ourselves, come back to give it back to our work? A solitary sandwich maybe efficient but is it effective?

Everyone should think about lunch more. Employers should value employees as people who need to eat. Employees should value employers as people for whose sake – among others – they eat. And maybe the ritual meal, the nourishing meal, the creative meal, food not as a weakness but as collaboration, can come back into business. So, re-build the subsidised canteen, bring back the dinner ladies!

Perhaps, even, we could invite Dionysos back to the lunch table, to oil our ideas, give us a little courage to make that intuitive leap, speak up to the boss, help us to dare outline that off-the-wall idea. Of course, it would be dangerous, but it’s food for thought.