July 2004 Archives

It's been three months since I last saw the doctor, so it was time for a check up today.

My blood pressure is still high, but the Doc thinks its the 'white coat effect'. I only have to see a Doctor, and that drives up my blood peruse. I get lower readings during my monthly checks with the nurse.

It seems I've lost 8Kg in the last three months. Thats good news. The walking is paying off. Now I think I'll start going to the gym so I don't 'plateau' off.

Of course, this improvement wouldn't have happened with out the support of Lisa, my darling wife.

We had an interesting conversation about my cholesterol level. Currently, it is 3.4 mmol/l (and a good figure is less than 5). Whilst my LDL cholesterol is good (2.0 mmol/l and they like it below 3.0¹), my HDL is only 1.0 mmol/l. Alas, they like it over 1. So, I have to start eating more oily fish and exercise some more -- so I'm double sure to go to the gym. Just for completeness, I'll say that my fasting triglyceride level is 0.7 mmol/l (less than 2.0 - good), and my total cholesterol to HDL ratio is 3.4 (and they like it below 4.5). So, generally, it sounds good.

I had hope he might have reduced the Inhibace, but no, not yet. In fact he's put me on folic acid too. I'll have to do some reading on that.

Footnotes

¹ Actually, he said for heart attack patients with bad arteries (not me really), they like it to below 2.5 mmol/l so I feel pretty good about it overall.

I bought a new pedometer/stepmeter a few weeks ago. Alas, the new one doesn't do a good job. I finally figured out that it was under reporting by 20 to 50 per cent. i.e. it was missing as many as half of my steps. I'd dropped it a few times so I decided to take it to pieces. Nothing obviously wrong there - the pendulum seemed fine. Even so, I though the problem was probably the result of dropping it.

Off to Tisdall's to get a new one.

But, I decided to check out all the different models (I'm still choosing Silva). After much shaking and tipping of all the different models, both I and the sales assistant agreed that the pendulums in the cheapest model is definitely lighter and, I suspect, less reliable. My first pedometer was not the cheaper model. My second one was. So, maybe the problem was the pedometer design rather than it being dropped.

Oh well. I'll let Tisdall's know.

This means that my last two weeks 'peds' are probably grossly in accurate.

I brief, mentioned elsewhere about teams seeking to deliberately sabotaging other teams. I don't know if this happens in this course or not, but I was thinking about those comments when I read:

White, J., & Taft, S. (2004). Frameworks for teaching and learning business ethics with the global context: Background of ethical theories. Journal of Management Education, 28(4), 463-477.

So, I'd thought I'd recount a few of thier ideas, and see if anyone found they relate to the way in which they approach things in general, or the course in particular.

In the article two general Western approaches to ethics are discussed; teleological and deontological.

Teleological¹ approaches to ethics focus on the consequences of actions. It is the consequences themselves, whether they result in harm or not, that are evaluated rather than the actions themselves. The major teleological theories of ethics include utilitarianism, egoism, and care.

Utilitarianism³ focuses on the social costs or benefits of decisions. A common version of utilitarianism is the idea of the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Thus utilitarianism, considers everyone, even if it doesn't benefit everyone. On the other hand, egoism is about obtaining the greatest good for oneself, and doesn't consider anyone else. The ethic of care, whilst also deontological, considers the impact of one's actions on others, and not only considers harm but also peoples feelings. The interesting thing with the ethic of care, is that it explicitly requires one to consider the context in which actions/decisions take place. E.g. are there some conditions where it is okay to kill someone?

Deontological² approaches to ethics sometimes referred to as the categorical imperative. That is to say, there are some actions that, in themselves, are intrinsically good. Thus, "A moral person makes an ethical decision based on what is right, using moral principles or rules, regardless of circumstances or consequences" (emphasis added, p. 466). But what should these principles or rules be? Citing Kant's view, the categorical imperative is "Every person should act only on those principles that he or she would prescribe as universal laws, applied toe everyone, assuming what is right for one person is right for all persons" (p. 467).

There are a number of 'regimes' that come from this approach. The rights perspective is based on the notion of basic human rights, such as those articulated in the American Constitution. Similarly, the justice approach seeks to use universal principles to judge what is fair (with variations for compensatory, redistributive, and retributive justice). Finally, the virtue ethic desires that people follow agreed upon rules -- i.e. they live their lives by specific virtues.

For me, I tend to use a mixture of both approaches. In some areas (particularly when dealing with students), I tend toward Utilitarian approaches. However, I'm also aware that there are times when I've bent the rules for students because of the situation/context. Then again, if you look at the Academic Honesty Assistance tutorial (Aha - which I helped to develop) you'll see elements of deontology. And no doubt, from time to time, I fall back on egoism.

Truth be told, I suspect that we all use a variety of ethical guides for our behaviour. But, I wonder how much our choices, say taking the ethic of care approach, or a justice approach, is driven by a muted reliance on egoism?

Footnotes

¹ Teleology - to do with purposeful action; explaining phenomena by looking at final results.

² Deontology - regarding moral obligations.

³ See the works of John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham.

I just received a brief email from a student asking how to prepare for Friday's case.

That really is a hard question to answer because I don't know what the student knows about prepping a case. I could tell them all I know, but that probably wouldn't be helpful as the student wouldn't have an organising framework and it would be disconnect from their own experience and knowledge.

Not only that, I hope that this course is developmental. I've said it elsewhere, but my expectation is that students will become more skilled at doing a case over the duration of the course. Thus, what is good now, might be considered poor later in the course. There are pros and cons to this approach. Amongst the pros are; 1) it allows students to develop a sophisticate approach to cases, without having to know everything or analyse everything at the beginning, 2) it allows good work to be rewarded appropriately throughout the whole course -- this is important because whilst at the end of the course, students may know everything right now they don't; and since they are assessed each week it could penalise them for not knowing it all, and finally, 3) it allows students to become their own strategist rather than conforming to some normative/prescriptive/formulaic expectations.

The biggest con is that the target is moving; and this can be un settling. How is it that something that is okay one week, is poor a month later? I think the way to deal with this is for students to constantly evaluate the performance of the best students in the class and comparing it with their own performance. I've found that students are very capable at spotting who is 'best' in the class. Generally, it is a good practice, in this class, to constantly be marking ones own performance. If anyone has other thoughts, I'd be really keen to hear them.

Anyway, I think the best way for that student to move forward is to prepare a case, and then come and talk to me about it - that way, I can give guidance on what will make the biggest difference for that student, rather than spending hours (days, or weeks) writing down all I know. So generally, if you want help with cases, be it with regard to preparing on presenting them, then come and see me once your have had a go at preparing it.

I've just received the lastest edition of the Journal of Management Education, and there is an element of sychronicity about it. The first article is:

Cunliffe, A. L. (2004). On becoming a critically reflective practitioner. Journal of Management Education, 28(4), 407-426.

In this article, she writes about many of the things I've discussed today, or over the past couple of days, as can be seen from the abstract:

Critically reflective practice embraces subjective understandings of reality as a basis for thinking more critically about the impact of our assumptions, values, and actions on others. Such practice is important to management education because it helps us to understand how we constitute our realities and identities in relational ways and how e can develop more collaborative and responsive ways of managing organizations. This article offers three ways to of stimulating critically reflective practice: (a) an exercise to help students think about the socially constructive nature of reality, (2) a map to help situate reflective and reflexive practice, and © and outline and examples of critically reflexive journalling.

I think the articles literature review is very accessible. In particular, the idea of "knowing and being" (p. 409) that leads to the ideas that "Knowledge is not just theory or information; it also incorporates knowing from within, a tacit practical consciousness of everyday sense making in which we implicitly know things about our surroundings (people,places, actions) and act from this" (p. 410). For me this is very much about bricolage (Ortmann & Salzmann, 2002). It is something I hope to foster in the Business Policy & Strategy course.

The links the author makes to Argyris & Scön are also very appropriate for the Management Theory & Practice course -- hoepful this will be seen later on in the course.

Those students who have been able to achieve a B+ with their journals (for Management Theory & Practice) might like to consider reading the article to see how they might take them to a new level. In fact, I think that anyone in MGMT 301¹ could improve their journals by reading the article.

And, even better (for me), the article has implications for my own practice too.

Footnotes

¹ Management Theory & Practice

References

Cunliffe, A. L. (2004). On becoming a critically reflective practitioner. Journal of Management Education, 28(4), 407-426.

Ortmann, G., & Salzmann, H. (2002). Stumbling giants. The emptiness, fullness, and recursiveness of strategic management. Soziale Systeme, 8(2), 205-230.

I've just opened the flood-gates again and sent out an email with the login details for Net Mike. One thing I'm interested in is the way in which people use the messaging board of Net Mike. I wonder how (or if) it will be used this time.

Here I'm trying to make a deliberate link between the current class and past classes. We have a long history in MGMT 301, and we're experimenting with how we can make better connection between the semesters for students. In the future, we hope that sharing the company cases will do that, but for now, I'm just trying to create some sense of history for the class.

After the 'exec' meetings yesterday, the three of us (DPE) got together to talk about the teams we had seen during the morning. Despite that debriefing, it still takes me a long time to process what I have seen and heard, and to think about the Learning journals that people have written.

When we, DPE, originally talked about the learning journals, we thought that it would take a few weeks before people got 'into their stride' and began to do well in them. Judging by the current crop that I've read, some people are setting a cracking pace already. Not only that, most of the anticipated grades¹ (of the ones I read) are close, if not identical, to the grade I'm going to give them. For a long time, I've said that students know the grade their work deserves; this just seems to re-enforce my position.

There were a number of discussions that I found particularly helpful (in the sense that I feel I understand a little better where the students are coming from). Firstly, with one team we had a robust discussion about the pros and cons of making assumptions -- I think this really leads into a discussion of how we construct our own theories of the world. Perhaps so of the later readings will be helpful with this, but many theories of learning, such as the Kolb cycle (1976), are not predicated on the individual discovering some fundamental, or scientific, truth. Rather, they are geared towards people find out how to function 'better' in the world in which they inhabit². This leads us to a very subjective view of the world -- and I'm aware that some, or even many, students find that an uncomfortable thought.

Second, is the issue of sharing information and learning. I hear that with in some departments or faculties, with regard to team projects, there is a culture of deliberately misleading other teams--I presume this means feeding them wrong information. I struggle to understand why someone would do this (either in a course, or outside of university). It isn't as if there are a finite number of As to go around³. Related to that, was this issue of the ranking of team members, and the intra-team competition that this might generate. True, it is possible to construe it that way; however, it isn't the only construction that can be placed on it. Later on, one of the readings discusses catalytic mechanisms. and forced ranking is an okay catalytic mechanism⁴.

¹ The grade that the students expected to get for their journal.

² See also something like George Kelly's experience cycle

³ The argument for grading on the curve (and thus having a finite number of As) is sometimes based on the idea that it encourages competition, and thus raises standards. In this department, we mark to a standard, rather than to a bell-curve.

⁴ I've read this in Jim Collins book, Good to great, but I think the class get it as an article (by him again) in the Harvard Business Review

References

Collins, J. C. (2001). Good to great: Why some companies make the leap--and others don't. New York: HarperBusiness.

Kelly, G. A. (1955). The psychology of personal constructs (1st ed.). New York: W. W. Norton.

Kolb, D. A. (1976). Management and the learning process. California Management Review, 8(3), 21-31.

After class today, a number of people came up to me and asked if the format of the class, in particular the type of questions I asked, would be the same each week.

I think my opening question on the Telecom Case was something like, "In 1999 would you have bought shares in Telecom?" A simple question, but to answer the question well it is necessary to have a sound understanding of the situation Telecom found itself in, and the problems it faced. Anyone, who had a prepared position on the case should have been able to provide a robust answer to that question (and some did).

We then sort of plodded through the BCG / Mintoesque approach of situation, complication, solution, and impact.

I doubt we will tackle a case using this approach (in this course). Firstly, using a structured approach, like this, is useful for those who find it hard to know where to begin with a case. But, in future, students will have a larger body of theory and experience on which to draw. In fact, each case is can be well address based on the readings for the week.

Actually, now I say it I wonder what Mason & Mitroff would have to say...

References

Mason, R. O., & Mitroff, I. (1998). Complexity: The nature of real world problems. In B. de Wit & R. Meyer (Eds.), Strategy process, content, context: An international perspective (2nd ed.). Minneapolis, MN: Thompson Learning.

Yesterday, in MGMT 101 - organisationa and management, I was laying out some of the territory that the class (and I, I suppose) will be covering in the coming weeks. For whatever reason¹, much of the course is structured around PLOC²; planning, leading, organising, and controlling. As I pointed out in class, this isn't an accurate description of what managers do. I mentioned that since the 1970s we (academics) have had a much richer view of the work of managers. In fact, I was alluding to the early (earliest) work of Henry Mintzberg³.

Anyway,as I was reading today, I came across a nice introductionary article to Henry Mintzberg. It's well worth reading by stage I students, and is called:

de Holan, P. M., & Mintzberg, H. (2004). Mangement as life's essence: 30 years of The nature of managerial work. Strategic Organization, 2(2), 205-212.

Additional, the article shows the serendipitous way in which new management ideas are 'discovered' and how they rise to prominance. There is a link here for later - in future we'll talk about In search of excellence, by Peters & Waterman. At that time, remember to ask why the book was so sucessful.

Henry also makes a point of saying how hard it is to teach management to those people who aren't managers - he is so right. Until you've been there it doesn't make much sense. Management is a practice (in Turner's sense) more than it is a science (or even an art), and so there is a significant element of management that is tacit (as there is in most parts of social life).

¹ Well, a good part has to do with the requirement that ICANZ put on institutions about the content that wanabe accountants have to be exposed to.

³ Which of course is based around Henri Fayol's ideas of planning, organising, commanding, co-ordinating, and controlling -- the commanding was reinvented as leading, and co-ordinating became organising.

² Mintzberg is mentioned quiet early on in the textbook - Inkson & Kolb, 2003 - but I dont' think it explains how he debunked the myth of the manager spending her/his time PLOCing.

References

Inkson, K., & Kolb, D. G. (2002). Management: Perspectives for New Zealand (3rd ed.). Auckland: Pearson Education.

Peters, T. J., & Waterman, R. H. (1982). In search of excellence: Lessons from America's best-run companies (1st ed.). New York: Harper & Row.

Turner, S. P. (1994). The social theory of practices: Tradition, tacit knowledge and presuppositions. Cambridge: Polity Press.

I've just finished reading:

Augier, M., & Sarasvathy, S. D. (2004). Integrating evolution, cognition and design: Extending ?Simonian? perspectives to strategic organization. Strategic Organization, 2(2), 169-204.

The abstract is:

Several streams of research in strategic management and organisational theory build upon the early work of Herbert Simon. Yet, as content analyses of articles published in leading management journals show, key ideas from his later years are for the most part either neglected or misinterpreted. We bring to strategic organization three constructs from Simon's later work and make a case for their use in future research in strategic management and entrepreneurship: Docility is a fundamental behavioral assumption in lieu of opportunism or embedded networks of trust; Near-decomposability is an evolutionarily robust structural feature that permeates Nature?s designs and has implications for human artifacts; and, Artifacts are products of human design that reshape local environments and/or help select between them to create and achieve human purposes. Each of these constructs embodies a uniquely Simonian integration of evolution, cognition, and design. Together they enable us to conceptualize empirical phenomena as thick three-dimensional reality rather than as abstractions entailed by any one of these perspectives alone.

I was particularly struck by the ideas of docility and near-decomposability. Citing Simon (1993 - which may be wrong), the authors explain that by docility they "mean the tendency to depend on suggestions, recommendation, persuasion, and information obtained through social channels as a major basis for decision" (p. 176). At first glance this may sound a lot like social learning theory, however they combine it with the idea that "for the most part, most human beings seek and give advice" (p. 178) this is a mechanism for the efficient distribution of learning, or as the authors might put it, it facilitates greater evolutionary fitness. Furthermore, docility leads to "the evolutionary dominance of intelligent altruism over economic or other forms of opportunism" (p. 176). I suspect that this is brought about by the way in which docility relies on and creates identity.

On the other hand, one of the features of near-decomposability (or ND), is that "in ND systems, each component [of the organisation] can evolve towards greater fitness with little dependence upon changes taking place in the details of other components (p. 179). Thus, each component is loosely coupled to others - but bound together by identity. The consequence of this is that rapid change can occur in a component without disrupting the whole.

At this point, I'm remind of Beinhocker's (2000) article, where he describes how components move across a fitness landscape, where vision is limited (maybe by bounded rationality) and so the 'best' strategy might be just to continue to move upwards -- but where in the long term it is more effective to also seed distant sites, in case they provide access to 'higher ground', e.g. greater fitness. This kind of approach can be successful if units are loosely coupled so they can adapt (or even die) without destroying the whole organisation.

The example they use is worth remembering.

27 expert entrepreneurs who where presented with exactly the same imaginary product and asked to make typical decisions that occur in a startup form. Received wisdom suggests that these experts would identify the most promising market opportunities for the product and devise strategies to capture leading positions in those markets. In contrast to this, the subjects often ignored or rejected market research data. Instead they leveraged who they were, what they new and whom they knew to construct very local and immediately implementable opportunities. They then imaginatively combined these initial segments together with contingencies to stitch together meaningful identifies that in turn pointed to new markets that neither they nor the market researchers could predict ex ante. (emphasis added, p. 183).

Thus we have two important mechanisms of evolutionary development. They consequences of using the two together, is that it can reduce transaction costs, whilst increasing altruism.

Overall, the article suggests that docility, near-decomposabilty, and artifact (which I've not discussed) overcome a number of troublesome dichotomies. However, I'm less convinced about this.

References

Beinhocker, E. D. (2000). On the orgin of stratgies. In C. Willhoite (Ed.), The McKinsey-Quarterly Anthology: On strategy (pp. 81-90): Mckinsey-Quarterly.

As part of the course MGMT 302 student's have to prepare a CV (well, complete a form that asks for some specific details) and get some work experience using Solo Mike (aka Mike's Bikes Advanced - Single Player).

A few people seem to be having problems in raising their shareholder value (SHV) from about $9 to $25 in four of five years. In the past we have seen students who are able to double their SHV every year. e.g. in four years, their SHV will be over $70. Anyway, what is worth noting is that when Solo Mike is started, there is an area in the simulation where a record can be made of the strategy that the player intends to use -- and in this area a default strategy has been filled in already -- and its a good strategy. If students follow it (in Solo Mike anyway) they should do okay.

Thinking of CVs I'm reminded of a time a few years ago. Imagine someone sitting at home. They have 5 identical positions for an entry level economist to fill, and over 300 people have applied for the job. So, they have a box (or two) containing 300 CVs. Each CV has been 'stripped'. Any fancy binding has be removed, as has any fancy covers -- doing that it makes it easier to handle and file the CVs. They create three piles:

• Definitely not
• Maybe
• Yes - go forward

In the next three or four hours they are going to go through the CVs (that's as many as 100 an hour, or just over 40 seconds each). Any flaws in the CV (spelling mistakes, missing information, poor grades) go straight in the Definitely not pile. The covering letter is used to distinguish between those in the Maybe and those in the Yes piles. At the end of the evening there are 40 CVs in the yes pile, 80 in the maybe, and the rest are definitely not. Given the number of CVs that got a Yes, the Maybes are never looked at again. (Oh, they never mentioned it in the advert, but they a looking for people who have worked well in teams; in undergrads, this often means they look for people who have played a lot of team sports, or have worked in a team - no team experience results in the CV being a Maybe instead of a yes.)

The next day, the 40 CVs are whittled down to 20, those twenty go forward for psych testing. Not even an interview yet...

At least in MGMT 301 we have exactly the same number of jobs as there are students.

And so semester two has started.

I've quiet a heavy teach load on Mondays. From 9-12 I have Management Theory & Practise (MGMT 301), after that the team has a debriefing meeting from 12-1, from 2-3 its _Business Policy & Strategy (MGMT 302), and finally I have _Organisations & Management (MGMT 101) from 5-6. It makes it a long day - but, generally, you know when it has worked well because you come away energised. Typically, when a class doesn't work it sucks the energy right out of you. Anyway -- today was a good day.

I'll think I'll talk about my day in reverse order.

MGMT 101 went well. Having listened to them talk about their favourite movies, it seems that they are a more eloquent and talkative group than many 101 classes would be. They seem to be willing to participate, and they enjoy a laugh. Thinking about what went on today, I'm not sure that I spent enough time on what my role in the class and in 101, in general, is. With regard to my general role, in the 101 teaching team I work with Joe (who has responsible for the course) and the other lecturers (Sanjay and Nigel) to shape the content of the course and the format of the assignments. Joe, besides doing that too, is heavily concerned with the processes in course - making sure the mechanics work. Joe is quiet skilled at managing the 1,000-odd students who are doing 101 at any one time. My role is the classroom is not about delivering content - it is showing the students how to think about the material. This is hard - it is much easier just to do a brain dump of information; but how to think about the material -- that's a different matter altogether. Given a situation, why (and when) is it better to treat it as, for example, a problem of motivation, and when might it be better to consider it as a matter of discipline. These are important distinctions. Furthermore, what are the limits to "our" managerial "knowledge? How much do we really know, and how much is transferable between context, e.g. why can you tackle some organisational issues one way -- say in a car dealership -- and why won't those same, successful, approaches fail in a not-for-profit, such as Greenpeace (and what learning can be transfered).

I'm always struck with the demographic split in MGMT 101. There are so many students there who attend because they have too--it's a mandatory core paper in the BCom--rather than because they are interested in the subject (I'm making a bit of a leap here, but I think it holds). This presents some interesting challenges to the lecture, as the two groups want (and need) different things. I wonder if this would be worth while bringing up in class for discussion - it makes an interesting management issue. Actually, one of the things we (the department) has discussed, for time to time, is "Should there be two stage I courses for management?" One course for those who need to do it as the core (much in the same way as we created the successfully SCIGEN201 course for the BTech students), and a separate course geared towards those people how intend to progress on in the management arena. It works for the BTechs, because it is quiet clear where their interests lie (in science and technology). However, with students doing a BCom, we've never been too sure about how fixed they are on their major (and being typical managers, we don't want to close off options early -- either theirs or ours).

MGMT 302 started really well too. It wasn't too long before some of the students were openly disagreeing with me and putting forward their positions quiet solidly. There were even some people who explained quite well the benefits of my stance. This all bodes well for the class - it's good to have people who can think for themselves. Talking of demographics, it is interesting to see the number of students in the class who have done the IB paper Foundations of strategy; having so many of them at the same time will make a difference to the dynamics of the class. I've had the occasional IB students (who have always done well), and they always bring a different type of approach to the cases. I'm looking forward to Friday and seeing how they will do with the cases.

So my day started out with MGMT 301. I was a little surprised, that I ended up doing most of the talking. But, then again, I had taken it upon myself to do some a 'deck' of slides for the class, so I suppose it was natural for me to most of the talking (as I was most familiar with where the slides would take us). Emma's video was good. After class, she reminded Darl and I how much of a defining moment the class had been for her. It will be interesting to see who is affected similarly in this cohort. As I looked around the room, I kept wondering "Which one of you will be taking on Emma's role in couple of years?", is there another "David Thomas" in the class?". Who, at the end of the semester, will we be tapping on the shoulder and saying "We think you should consider Honours or a Masters degree"?

During lunch, I walked down to Tisdall's and brought a new pedometer. I lost mine yesterday somewhere in between going in to School to watch the BCG case teams present. I do like to know that I'm getting enough 'peds' in. Any it's lost, so I brought a new one...

I'm still sticking with the Silva brand. They (Lisa's used them before) are pretty reliable. If they have one problem, it's that they can fall off your belt when getting into a car (or similar). I think that's what happened to my old one. So, I'll be getting my toolbox out and making a few modifications to this one.

So, the peds keep racking up.

Google still isn't crawling the site (much). I think part of the problem is that there are very few sites which link to this one. Besides The Woolseys and Consulting, I can't find many sites that link here.

Oh well. I expect time will take care of that problem.

As we move towards a new semester, Darl and I are pondering "When is the best time to rollover the simulation?"

In our class, we use the business simulation NetMike as a practice field for our students. Typically we simulate between seven and ten years. Each simulated year occurs when we rollover the simulation to a new year.

In the past we have done the rollovers every Monday at mid-day or, alternatively, at 4:00 on a Friday. Thus each simulated year takes a week in real time. The advantages of doing the rollover on a Monday is that it allows teams to meet over the weekend to make their decisions. However, do we really want to encourage students to work during the weekend? Are we facilitiating bad habits? That is why we have also tried to have rollovers on a Friday, so that students are constrained to stay within the working week, so to speak.

On top of that, I suspect that when we have a Monday rollover, some students are being 'coerced' into working at weekends when they would rather not. I'd be interested to hear from past and current students as to what their 'take' is on this issue.

I guess you can tell I'm back by the volume of my postings ...

Anyway, I've been running a couple of link checkers over the site to find any dead (or incorrectly entered) links. I've fixed most of the problems that are internal to the site (i.e. within http://www.thereflectivepractitioner.org/), but some of the links outside the site have suffered from link rot.

Of course, it may be possible to find a copy of the material that has been lost at the Wayback machine (aka the Internet Archive).

I wonder how many people know their sites are being archived like that?

On my recent trip to EGOS, Lisa and I spent a couple of days in the UK catching up the Lisa's family. Here I am with Malcolm, her brother-in-law, cooking at a BBQ in the 'English' manner -- that is to say in the pouring rain. It actually had been a lovel day up until we started to cook.

We also took the time to go on the London Eye. By chance, rather than by good planing, we got there early and didn't have to queue too long. This is a lovel picture of Lisa, with London in the background, taken in mid 'flight' as they call the ride.

I see that Amit has an interesting comment on Google. He says that:

Key words "armi reflective" appears number two in google amazing, "reflective practitioner" comes up about 6th ... amazing!

I'm a little surprise as I've been having problems getting google to trawl the site correctly. Although Google comes to http://www.thereflectivepractitioner.org/ every day or so, it never crawls through the whole web site. It just reads the robots.txt file and the main index of The reflectivepractitioner and then stops. I can't figure out what's going on.

The robot exclusion file, that is to say robots.txt, shouldn't stop it crawling. The meta data in the index.html page, i.e. <meta name="robots" content="index,follow,noarchive" /> shouldn't stop it -- so what's happening? I emailed the folks at Google and got a very general reply back. I should try emailing them again. In the meantime, if anyone has an idea why the site isn't being crawled - please let me know.