The company you keep

For some it's Jane Austen, Bukowski or Kundera. For me it's a kind of random wave of books about business, culture, the arts… pretty much anything.

Here is what I have on the go at the moment:

The Age of Enchantment - Beardsley, Dulac and their Contemporaries 1890-1930

I have a thing about illustration. When I was a kid at high school I made a poster for the annual school production - a play called 'As Long As They're Happy'. I made an image that was a complete rip-off of an Aubrey Beardlsey image - Salome or something. It was a triumph of teenage angst over imitative graphic style. I over-estimated Glenfield College's appetite for Art Nouveau.

Brokeback Mountain

I got this cheap from the Whitcoulls bookstore's trestle table clearance in the local mall. Five bucks for a collection of stories by Annie Proulx is the bargain of the year. She is one of the best writers I have ever encountered. I soaked up Accordion Crimes and The Shipping News. The over-merchandising of the Brokeback Mountan Story (which is all of 35 pages long) smacks of over-merchandising, but that's Hollywood for you.

Luxury Brand Management - A world of Privilege
I am developing a theory about New Zealand's commercial future in the world. That is all I can say at the point.

The Knowledge Entrepreneur
The term entrepreneur makes me cringe, but figuring out how to make money form ideas is core business, need to know stuff. All I'll say, so far is 'I will not judge a book by its cover' - which looks worryingly like Microsoft clip art.

The Natural Advantage of Nations: Business Opportunities, Innovation and Governance in the 21st Century

OK, a little daunting because I know it has an ideological bias. But, not matter how dull, the sustainability thing has to be addressed. So I am holding my nose and taking the plunge.

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Johnny Bunko competiton

The Great Johnny Bunko Challenge from DHP on Vimeo . There's a young chap in Indiana, one Alec Quig , who has written to me about creating a career based on a polymathic degree, from which he has recently graduated. He's an interesting young man and his concerns about going forward in life are the anxieties we all face at crossroads in our lives when we are forced to make choices. Dan Pink's latest book The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You'll Ever Need might help: "From a New York Times, BusinessWeek, and Washington Post bestselling author comes a first-of-its- kind career guide for a new generation of job seekers.There's never been a career guide like it.the fully illustrated story (ingeniously told in Manga form) of a young Everyman just out of college who lands his first job. Johnny Bunko is new to parachute company Boggs Corp., and he stumbles through his early days as a working stiff until a crisis prompts him to find a new job. St

Ze Frank thinks so you don't have to

Ze Frank appeared on my radar when I saw his presentation among the excellent TED Talks videos . This morning I was reading Russell Davies planning blog in which he referred to a clip by Ze Frank - Where do ideas come from. Here's the transcript: "...Hungry Hippo licks Aunt JEmima [sic] writes, "Are you ever gonna break into song again? Are you running out of ideas?" Hungry Hippo licks Aunt JEmima, that's a good question. I run out of ideas every day! Each day I live in mortal fear that I've used up the last idea that'll ever come to me. If you don't wanna run out of ideas the best thing to do is not to execute them. You can tell yourself that you don't have the time or resources to do 'em right. Then they stay around in your head like brain crack. No matter how bad things get, at least you have those good ideas that you'll get to later. Some people get addicted to that brain crack. And the longer they wait, the more they convince themse

Sexist Advertising and stereotypes

Advertising lives in the short-form world. Because mass media is so expensive the 30 second commercial is conventional and because there is so much clutter simplified signals are essential to 'cut through'. One form of communication short-hand used as a default is the stereotype - "A stereotype can be a conventional and oversimplified conception, opinion, or image, based on the assumption that there are attributes that members of the "other group" have in common. Stereotypes are sometimes formed by a previous illusory correlation, a false association between two variables that are loosely correlated if correlated at all. Though generally viewed as negative perceptions, stereotypes may be either positive or negative in tone." In the 1950's and 60's when men dominated advertising stereotypical impressions of women as inferior or subservient were not only commonplace but usual. It was normal to show women as housekeepers, largely because most wer

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