What if there was a big, hairy, gnarly beast of a thing…how would you go about tackling it?

Well, probably rather carefully!

How about thoughtfully, bit-by-bit….raising ideas, not solutions.

My posts normally focus on a particular point. Sure, they are all linked together in one glorious philosophical mess…but they (hopefully) stand on their own.

This time it’s different. I have (what I believe to be) an important story to tell and a message to create curiosity…but I’m conscious that you probably don’t want to read a book!

So, I aim to take you on a journey by breaking the ‘adventure’ down into interesting ‘Chapters’, and release a chapter per day until we are done.

There are 5 chapters:

• starting with “A long time ago…”; and

• ending with “…and we all lived happily ever after”.

Well, I doubt the Disney ending (I should probably add an alternative ‘Armageddon’ finale) but I definitely aim to reach a conclusion, that is of use to society.

“But what’s it going to be about?!”

If you read the end of my last post then I hinted that this story will hurtle towards ‘large corporates’ owned by floating (i.e. short-term thinking) shareholders.

Is this ‘story’ relevant to you? Probably!

• you may work in such an organisation (or do so in the future);
• you will likely have investments or pension funds that own shares in them (even if you don’t realise this or don’t think about this much);
• we are nearly all customers of such organisations; and
• we are all affected by them!

Now then, are we sitting comfortably? Good, then tomorrow I shall begin.

Update: Link forwards to Chapter 1

Footnotes:

1. “Your Money or Your Life!”: the title of the post refers to the folklore words uttered by a Highwayman as he holds up a stagecoach. He (or, if you are a Blackadder Series 3 fan, ‘She’) is asking you whether you’d prefer to hand over your money or lose your life.

• If you hand over the money in the short term then you can go on to long term success; however
• If you attempt to protect the money, then you die. Nice.

…and I hope those of you from the 1980s enjoy the Adam ‘the highwayman’ Ant pop. culture image.

2. A word of encouragement: If you are thinking “oh no, he’s writing a long one again!” then ooops, sorry. It’s just that this subject matter really needs to cover a few bases.

I am invoking the following quote in my defence:

“Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler.” (attributed to Einstein)

I promise that I won’t make a habit out of it (it takes far too much out of me!) and normal service will resume just as soon as I’ve got over the effort of this one 🙂