Jul. 12th, 2009

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I have now read through about half of my textbooks for Financial Management and Management Perspectives and I have to conclude with something that I always suspected; management (at least the theory side) is easy or, more to the point, as a academic discipline it is rather lightweight (to this day, Peter Drucker is the only figure I can think of being worthy of note). Of course, I do come to this with decades of prior experience in the social sciences including a fair serve of economics, so perhaps it's just relatively easy given that background. Within the mindset however, I've also been reading Stephan Covey's popular self-help book Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. I am usually extremely cynical of the entire genre of such texts, but to give Cobey his due, he did a great deal of research on the characteristics of 'great leaders' and came to the conclusion is that it was their constant orientation towards universal moral principles that was their defining quality. A critic of "personality ethics" over "principle ethics", Covey quotes from the Marxist psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, radicals like Thomas Paine and Henry David Thoreau and existentialists like Victor Frankl.

Attended a Labor Party branch meeting on Wednesday; speaker was from the Alternative Technology Association explaining the Federal governments subsidy and loans schemes for those who wish to put in solar hot water, insulation, energy efficient globes etc into their home (whether owned or rented). I consider such plans to good examples of interventionist, socialist economics; directed towards reducing the negative externalities and where the long-term savings far exceed the short-term costs. It strikes me that this has come through a reformist programme, despite the extra-parliamentary advocacy of environmentalist causes; and it makes me wonder how many of the far left have ever taken seriously Trotsky's theory of the united front - and what can be done about this. Of course, the key problem it is a united front of worker's organisations against the bourgeoisie; neglecting, yet again, the important possibility of the proletariat and bourgeoisie united against the landlord monarchs.

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Diary of a B+ Grade Polymath

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