Will you walk into my parlour?" said the Spider to the Fly,
‘Tis the prettiest little parlour that ever you did spy;

The way into my parlour is up a winding stair,
And I’ve a many curious things to shew when you are there."

Oh no, no," said the little Fly, "to ask me is in vain, For who goes up your

winding stair can ne’er come down again."

This is the first stanza of Mary Howitt’s poem, written in the 19th century, which was immortalised by Lewis Carroll.

In the 21st century you would have thought that the interchange between the technophobic flies and the technophilliac spiders was the contemporary struggle of business and society.

The irrational fear of technology that constitutes technophobia seems to be completely baffling for many companies, consumers and commentators. The seduction of the form, function, creativity and beauty of the web is sometimes so overpowering that our lust for life can get seriously distracted.

Similarly the glistening of raindrops falling from a spider’s web, after the sun comes out, is one of the visual wonders of nature. But, in a society that is increasingly surveyed by digital means, you don’t have to be a technophobe to not wish to enter technology’s parlour.

Yet technology is much more than adapting to non-human structures, it is central to the social practices of modernity. The intellectual own-goal of post-modernism in which everything is relative and nothing is rationally solid aids irrational fear of change.

Each generation rejects and finally embraces technology as it adapts to its use and impact. George Stephenson’s Rocket helped usher in the railway age but railways invoked strong opposition among the Victorian populace.

Leonardo da Vinci’s dream of a flying machine stimulated the interest of the Inquisition, and fear of flying is not just the title of a modern feminist fable. It is a common condition - as the logic of heavier than air machines is insufficiently powerful to overcome visceral emotion.

Da Vinci’s flying machine

The contemporary fear of technology is often a function of dystopian visions of a world in which were all start to become cyborg replicants with our memories and imaginations manufactured. In this Stepford-world we all become the ideal-typical citizen, displaying no physical flaw or psychology fissure; the transmogrified dream of a Second Life existence.

Perhaps this is a more appealing vision than the nostalgic longings for a false past, akin to well-known television adverts promoting a brand of bread, which conveniently overlook the disabling poverty of the time.

Technophobia can act as a selection device in the working environment. Many human resource managers in business and organisations often seek to recruit Avatar-like individuals.

The recruitment of charismatic characters who are pleasing on the eye may however undermine any team ethic, as these attractive newcomers provoke envy and dislike, especially if they display heroic qualities of technophillia.

Despite the billions of dollars that are spent on the global management training industry, the common assumption among trainers that work colleagues should like each other is often a false one.

There are legion stories of how individuals in sports teams, whether football or Formula One, and musical groups hate each other but as teams and groups are very successful. It is just because they are creative or is it a condition of the anomie and alienation that work creates?

The Spider’s Stratagem is one of Bernardo Bertolucci’s most renowned films. The central character, Magnani, returns to the village in which his father is lionised as an anti-fascist hero. But he finds that the father was more of a collaborator than a hero. Disillusioned, Magnani descends into a journey of madness in which his love for his late father turns to hatred.

The tale of the spider and fly equally applies to technology and the work environment. In many instances, technology enables us to do things more ably whether in or out of work. Liking your colleagues may be as irrational disliking them in the to ability to do your job. The bottom line is that you just have to respect both resources, whether virtual or real, which just might keep companies in business and employees in work, able to consume a large amount and range of goods and services.

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Leslie Budd is Reader in social enterprise at The Open University Business School. He is an economist and has written extensively on the relationship between regional and urban economics, and international financial markets.

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The pamphlet of the same name, written by Lenin in 1902, called for the formation of a revolutionary vanguardist party.

Well, it is claimed that we live in revolutionary times as these crises have turned our economic complacency on its head, as all that was formerly solid seems to have melted into air.

Lenin meets the design economy: Busts in Lenin’s Mating Call, a Moscow restuarant [Image: Anosmia under CC-BY licence]

Let’s dispense with the forces of reaction who proclaim the knowledge economy as the entity that will lead us to some glorious future based on the knowledge industries. All economies are knowledge economies, whether their industries are at primary, secondary or tertiary stages in their development.

And what are the knowledge industries?

• Business and financial services?
• Software and digital media?
• But what about street cleaning or mining or sandwich making?

They all require knowledge to be undertaken efficiently, so then are the denizens of the knowledge economy talking of weightless goods and services?

Well, services that provide on-line airline tickets are part of a supply chain that feeds passengers onto heavier-than-air planes.

Moreover, the commodities boom associated with the rise of the emerging economies suggests that economic heaviness still counts. Is the point that there are differences in outputs and inputs in the form of value-added? Maybe so, but this has always been the case.

One of the myths of the UK economy is that it is dominated by financial services. The mistake is to equate the fall in employment in manufacturing with its contribution to value-added of the economy.

The data shows that the financial sector in total accounts for about 9% of Gross National Product in the United Kingdom and manufacturing nearly 13%.

But wholesale financial services (City of London-type activities) accounts for about for 2.5% of GDP of which half was exposed to the financial crisis. So we seem to have designed a knowledge economy in the form of an upside-down pyramid in which a fortieth of a £1.5 trillion economy appears to drive the rest.

The opportunity for a fully- and colourfully- plumed creative phoenix to come to the rescue is very apparent.

It is clear that manufacturing still matters. And, more importantly, how design is central to our socio-economic purpose, whether it be fashion, or buildings or turbines or social networking sites.

We are both designed for living, as Noel Coward, the English actor and dramatist, may have noted in a different context, but live for design.

But this appears to be one of the most overlooked atavistic aspects of our existence. The ubiquity of the mobile phone rests on its aesthetic, technological and functional design, whether it is part of Grameen Bank’s Village Phone project in Bangladesh or in adapting it to local entrepreneurial uses in Burkina Faso.

The internet may be a thing of beauty but its design is abstracted from our everyday experience, in a way the touch and feel of our mobile phones are not.

In large parts of the world the problem of Internet access and the digital divide is being overcome by creative individuals using their entrepreneurial flair to create new business and social opportunities.

Given that creativity and innovation are central to the human condition, why do creative individuals still provoke suspicion in many businesses and organisations?

Why do so many companies view themselves as Kafkaquese castles in which employees are dragooned into a bureaucratic mindset?

One answer would be that in certain sectors and industries this is a necessary condition of business. But, if you take the mining industry, it has to be populated by creative employees - given the natural and technological challenges it faces.

The problem goes back to the German sociologist Max Weber and his distinction between traditional authority (bestowed by custom and tradition) and charismatic authority (bestowed by the distinctive personal qualities which inspire devotion).

In a business context this translates into traditional and charismatic leadership. In the face of the former, creatives will experience and display anomie and alienation, they need charismatic leadership.

Traditional structures of authority are redolent of organisations like broadcasters and universities, yet they are comprised of creative individuals who only respond to charismatic processes of leadership.

In the United Kingdom, our museums and art galleries are emporia of design, whether old or new, and are major attractions for millions of visitors from all over the world. They are the first port of call in the gestation of childrens’ design education, whether the young go onto to be scientists and engineers or choreographers and make-up artists.

In the rest of the globe the genie of design, unlocking economic development and sustainability, is everywhere to be seen. This genie also opens up a gamut of political spaces as creatives challenge the status quo of authoritarian regimes.

The bottom line is whether you are Stephen Hawking or Phillipe Starck - or Richard Buckminister Fuller or Max Planck - creative individuals are essential and central to the development of a design economy. Unlike the knowledge economy, whose conceptual and practical foundations and robustness are built on an intellectual pinhead, this economic trajectory can go a long way in challenging the current reactionary orthodoxies that brought us to crisis in the first place.

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Leslie Budd is Reader in social enterprise at The Open University Business School. He is an economist and has written extensively on the relationship between regional and urban economics, and international financial markets.

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Money may make the world go round but property sustains the economy

That could be a - caricatured - slogan of the complex relationship of property and leisure.

Property is, however, a deeper and more fundamental facet of our socioeconomic existence than is often realised. At a visceral psychological and anthropological level, place matters - nesting seems to be written into the human genetic barcode.

This nesting behaviour can also be seen in our leisure time as we appropriate places for a range of activities that would seen bizarre to any alien creature from a parallel universe.

Yet, paradoxically, property and leisure excite moral opprobrium from a number of groups and individuals.

The Peruvian development economist Hernando de Soto received death threats from the Maoist-influenced guerilla group Shining Path for suggesting that property right contracts would help alleviate poverty in his country.

For Shining Path and others, the bestowing of property rights are at the root of the evils of capitalism.

Yet property rights precede capitalism as both David Ricardo and Karl Marx demonstrated.

The second home dream: a cottage in Brittany [Image: Michael Foley Photography under CC-BY-NC-ND licence]

The Scottish political philosopher David Hume influenced the later idea of the “tragedy of the commons” in which common land becomes congested and unproductive as more and more use is made of it.

Without some allocation of property rights – whether public or private – then common land will deteriorate, as de Soto tried to show in regard to squatting on land in Latin America.

Similarly, there is a residue of biblical aversion to leisure based on the edict that man should labour for six days and rest on the Sabbath.

It is rumoured that H.G.Wells each year bought tickets on the London-Paris boat train intending to take a holiday. He would turn up at Victoria Station, watch his train depart and return home on the basis that the expectation was far superior to the reality.

His science-fiction contemporary, Jules Verne was influenced by Thomas Cook’s first round the world tourist holiday to write Around the World in 80 Days. These cultural influences are important, but as we have got wealthier, we work less time but seek productive labour in our leisure time. So much so, in fact, that we appear to live more in a leisure economy rather than a production one.

In fact, that is in part because leisure has become commodified like everything else. For example 40% of London’s Gross National Product (GDP) is accounted for by hotels, catering and transport.

According to the market intelligence company Datamonitor, the global hotels, restaurants & leisure industry generated total revenues of $2.14 trillion in 2008 (about the same size as the UK economy), representing a compound annual growth rate of 5% for the period 2004-2008.

Moreover, property is central to the leisure sector’s activities, whether in the form of hotels, airports and aircraft, theme parks and leisure complexes, gardening centres and DIY sheds, theatres and festivals sites among many many others.

Globally, tourism, whether sustainable or not, is central to economic development and is an important driver of real estate development and its costs and benefits.

Moreover there is a large reserve army of leisure workers seasonally swarming around the globe, in worker, drone and queen bee roles who have to be accommodated. For a famous 19th century French anarchist, property may equal theft but increasingly it equals leisure.

In his disputes with David Ricardo over the theory of rent, Karl Marx showed that land is a fixed and circulating form of capital. In the latter, circulating, case we are talking about how changes in the value of fixed land can be turned into a flow of revenue.

Thus property and changes in its value is a crucial part of balance sheets of companies. So the use and management of property is endemic to business, and especially for the leisure sector.

In Northern Europe, we have seen a shift away from the traditional two-week beach holiday, to city breaks and cultural excursions.

Our fascination with cities old and new, whether Calatrava’s Valencia or Haussmann’s Paris, cuts across our working and leisure time as billions of us commute into the world’s metropolises each day, whist simultaneously being leisurely flaneurs of their form and content.

Furthermore, despite a digital age, international firms still cluster into the world’s largest metropolises to do business and are important patrons of the architecture and shape of the built environment: witness the Al-Burj Tower in Dubai, the world’s tallest building.

Moreover, property is the root cause of all financial crises, as the recent sub-prime mortgage one has so amply demonstrated.

When I was growing up my family took two week holidays with relatives during the “Paisley Fair”, when all the local factories in this Scottish town closed down for two weeks and migrated to the west coast resorts. There was also the Renfrew and Glasgow Fairs, but essentially one form of property was being exchanged for another form under the guise of changing activities.

Conspicuous consumption has always gone hand in hand with conspicuous leisure as the economist and sociologist, Thorsten Veblen clearly demonstrated in his renowned book, Theory of the Leisured Classes.

For the contemporary leisured classes a second home abroad is seen as a social imperative. But you have to be part of the propertied classes in order to afford this form of leisure.

Leisure and class; class and leisure: it still seems part of the same old propertied story.

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Leslie Budd is Reader in social enterprise at The Open University Business School. He is an economist and has written extensively on the relationship between regional and urban economics, and international financial markets.

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Woolly and aspirational wants lead to over-ambitious and poorly defined systems that take longer to design and implement, and they go over budget.

Can woolly computer users get the systems they need? [Image: CaliforniaAmy under CC-BY-NC-SA licence]

But it’s not just the customer who’s aspirational. In one public sector IT project, optimistic and enthusiastic IT staff thought, “Yes, an online payment - that’s what they really need, surely.”

But when they engaged in discussion, they discovered that the client was less enthusiastic about the IT department’s suggestion, and didn’t expect much take up or benefit. But what the client thought would really be of benefit was a telephone payment service.

The system, consequentially implemented, brought in a significantly larger sum of money to the public organisation.

This behaviour has led to better performance on both sides and there are two points here.

One is that the two parties talked with each other. The IT people knew what was technically feasible and the business people knew what they wanted.

The second point is that the clients knew what they wanted most – they were able to prioritise their wants.

However, prioritisation often has an additional complication in the public sector because politicians, too, are aspirational.

Too often new political events crop up before IT developers have had the time to develop and implement complex systems demanded by earlier requirments - so clients never realise anticipated benefits.

The scale and complexity of government IT systems damages IT suppliers as well as the public sector. The Financial Times reported that ISoft and BT’s Global Services Division suffered financial losses on the £12.76bn National Programme for IT, the programme to link the NHS IT systems.

Put together aspirational suppliers, aspirational clients and aspirational politicians and you have a recipe for disaster.

So how do you get round these aspirations to achieve affordable IT systems that do what is required of them on time, in budget?

One way is to provide a context in which those key parties willingly come together, where they have opportunities to discuss the project, and to contribute their skills.

But having created the context, you then must ask ‘are these the right people coming together’?

Find the right people with the right skills.

But you need more than business or technical skills. You need people who are willing to share their skills, and can share what they know.

This means they have to be able to communicate and connect in a wide range of contexts, both formal and informal, as well as being open and honest, and taking the time to build up trust.

As trust builds, people recognise their communalities, and become more willingly to adapt and share risk.

This engagement with each other allows people to unravel that wooliness, to prioritise their wants and helps people reach closer to their aspirations.

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Soccer City, venue for the World Cup Final [Image: Digital Globe Imagery under CC-BY-NC-ND licence]

You could be forgiven in thinking that football pundits (the bland, the boring and the buffoon) and business gurus shared the same genetic code, expressed in their excessive desire to state the blindingly obvious.

For football it’s the game of the long ball versus the short ball; for business it’s the long run versus the short run. But, in a sense, it is about so much more, as the French-Algerian writer Albert Camus, who won the North African Champions League as a goalkeeper with his club, wrote:

"All I know most surely about morality and obligations, I owe to sport and learned it in the RUA [Racing Universitaire Algerios, his team].”

Even his former friend and existentialist protagonist, Jean-Paul Sartre, observed that the presence of the opposition complicated the game of football. Like football, business is not such a simple game but is one that is frequently reduced to cliché.

What connects the apparently disparate activities of banking, mining and music? Well you could say mining is concerned with the long term, whilst banking and music is about the short-term, with the last tow activities seeking instant returns from their immediate services.

But dig a little deeper and you find that they are all very old, and some would say timeless, global businesses. In music publishing the most popular tunes and songs were first written and played a long time ago. Morecombe and Wise may have sung “bring me sunshine” in the 1970s without giving any suspicion that its provenance which was of a decade earlier.

Retailing banking, despite the poor reputation it has developed since off-shoring much of its activities, is built on long-term relationships with its customers. In a fractional-reserve banking system, the state has to rescue it from trouble if the whole financial system is not to collapse, amply demonstrated by recent events.

Short-term horizons appear to be otiose for the mining industry, but the long lead times of investing in new technologies whose applications are uncertain tends to create incentives for mergers and acquisitions.

These incentives have been reinforced by the rise in global commodities prices which saw nickel move from US$4600 in 2003 a tonne to over US$55000 a tonne in 2007, whilst the price of gold hit an all-time high this week. In this environment, a company like BHP Billiton was encouraged to attempt a hostile takeover of Rio Tinto, which failed and cost the former US$462m in fees.

It was claimed that synergies for the merger would have significantly reduced costs and thus boosted the short-term share price. In other words, the idea that financial services promote the short-term at the expense of the long-term interests of a global primary industry is often not borne out in practice. A similar argument applies to hedge funds ,who now appear to conform to the cliché of being the arch-villain of financial capitalism.

They balance short and long investment positions to manage the risk of applying sum large of capital to small spreads between the buying and selling prices of assets. If they only operate on one side of these transactions they are engaging in speculation and trying to manage uncertainty rather than risk: a logically impossible task.

If we go back to economic theory we find that the long-run average cost curve is a locus of a number of short-run curves. So, in business practice and theory it is not only a game of two halves, but one of two times.

Time is also an important element in recruiting and retaining talented staff whose contribution should not be a short-term one, unless of course they are not sufficiently talented for the organisational roles they take on. The Long the Short and the Tall is a play written by Willis Hall in 1959, in which a seven-man patrol is engaged in distracting the Japanese during an exercise during the Second World War. The different psychologies of the protagonists come to the fore as they come under pressure – displaying varying degrees of dysfunctional talent, which in many ways is no different from that faced by any organisation.

Recruiting and retaining staff is a talent in itself and the first duty is not to fall into the Oscar Wilde trap. In The Picture of Dorian Gray , he wrote “It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances”. Well if a mining firm is recruiting a senior geologist with specialist experience, it may wish to become shallow, if only momentarily, as such an individual would be retained for a long period. In recruiting a junior employee, a high-street bank would not be irrational if the candidate’s only response was to iterate “computer says no”.

Other people are always hell, as Sartre perceptively noted, but trying to make them round pegs to fit into rounds holes is not always rational and what may have been a round peg at interview may turn out to be a square peg upon employment. Pride and prejudice are not good positions to hold in you are trying the recruit and retain the best talent. It often depends on the sector you operate in and whether the economic cycle is at a stage where there are labour and skills shortages.

Still everything to play for? [Image: laura padgett under CC-BY-ND licence]

Football used to be a 90 minute game but the introduction of added time means that is frequently a 94 minute one. In knockout competitions extra-time is often played with the result being decided on penalties. Well, the way in which teams negotiate the length of the game may be a more important component than their talent if its goes to penalties.

Similarly focusing on one time horizon rather than a number is a game that business plays frequently with subsequent losses. Equally in recruiting and retaining talent, time is an important consideration if companies want to get the best out of their teams and stellar players. But, the bottom line is that like football the results are not always the expected ones which is what makes both games fascinating to play and watch, which a lot more rewarding than TV talent contests in which the talentless are the star players.

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About the author

Leslie Budd is Reader in social enterprise at The Open University Business School. He is an economist and has written extensively on the relationship between regional and urban economics, and international financial markets.

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What is biodiversity?

Loosely defined, biodiversity is a term used to describe the variety of life on Earth – be it plants, animals, microorganisms – living in the oceans, on land, air or even deep underground.

Why should we care for it?

Biodiversity is the essential fabric of life on our planet and has an important role to play, including provision of food, shelter, fuel and health. There is also a less direct, but probably even more important role in the form of natural ecosystem services. This, for example, could be in helping purify the water we drink or the air we breath through decomposition of wastes and cycling of important nutrients – all of which is mediated by different forms of life. The value on such services is so huge, it has been estimated to be almost twice that of the total gross national product of all countries in the world (WRI).

So, it is very important we take care of such diversity because our life depends on them and we can ill-afford to find a substitute (if there is any).

What is facing biodiversity now?

Throughout the Earth’s history, new species have appeared while earlier ones disappeared through natural processes. However, currently there is an accelerated loss of biodiversity happening, mainly due to the interference by human beings. There are many ways this is happening, eg due to over-exploitation of resources (imagine the hunting to extinction of the dodo), habitat destruction (massive deforestation in the Amazon), pollution (industrial wastes in water bodies). There is also the threat of man-made climate change, which will have far-reaching global impact by affecting where species live.

What can I do?

Apart from celebrating biodiversity and helping bring attention to it, you can help by getting involved or supporting local conservation organisations; learning more about biodiversity and teaching others; voting for authorities that have positive roles and also getting involved in research such as Citizen Scientist.

Find out more:

Find out about the Biodiversity and Wine Initiative (South Africa)

More on the Defra, Darwin Initiative (UK)

Information about Global Environment Facility

United Nations Environment Programme

Fragile Web publication from the OU's Jonathan Silvertown

Saving Species TV series on Open2.net

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About the author

Dr Yoseph Araya is a plant ecologist and associate lecturer at the Open University. He works on the biology and conservation of South African fynbos vegetation. Environmental education and the role of the public in research is one of his key interests.

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