People no longer feel free to act on their best judgment, because of the fear of lawsuits, according to lawyer Philip K Howard in a talk given to the TED conference in February. But what should be do about it? We do not want to give up the right to seek redress in the courts when people do something wrong, and we want to make sure we can still take legal proceedings to stop people polluting or engaging in other damaging conduct…

Howard has four propositions for simplifying the law: 1. Judge law mainly by its effect on society, not individual situations; 2. Trust in law is an essential condition of freedom. Distrust skews behaviour towards failure; 3. Law must set boundaries protecting an open field of freedom, not intercede in all disputes; and 4. To rebuild boundaries of freedom, two changes are essential: simplify the law, and restore authority to judges and officials to apply law.

By attempting to create a system where no-one can have bad values, we have created a system where no-one can have good values. Accountability needs to be judged by the effect of actions on everybody, not just on the disgruntled person. If the judge does not have the authority to toss out unreasonable claims, then all of us go through the day looking over our shoulders.

International holidays for Australian travellers are increasingly including sight-seeing tours of slums, according to a recent article by Mark Russell in The Age. Some see slum tourism as a form of philanthropic travel, whereas others see it as no more than a form of exploitation, in which the misery and squalor of the slum residents’ lives is put on display to satisfy the ghoulish curiosity of the wealthy tourist.

As someone who has visited slums many times, I have thought a lot about this issue. I think it is easy for Western visitors to think that, just by visiting a slum, they are doing something on the forefront of the fight against global poverty. In reality, the only thing you achieve by such a visit is gaining first-hand exposure to poverty, and this is only useful, in my view, if you then take some sort of action to address poverty.

There are many ways in which visiting slums can be helpful to those who live there. This is particularly the case if you are visiting to help some community-based program, but it can even happen if you are just there to visit and encourage the downtrodden, such as people who have been ostracised by the rest of their community as a result of AIDS. But if you do not not have a clear intention of helping, it is more difficult to justify visiting a slum.

The American author, media theorist and cultural critic Neil Postman was born on this day 79 years ago. He was a professor in the School of Education of New York University and chairman of the Department of Culture and Communication until a year before his death in 2003. The author of eighteen books and more than 200 magazine and newspaper articles, Postman is best known for his authorship of the book Amusing Ourselves to Death.

Postman argued that the US has developed into a technopoly, which is a society that believes the primary goal of human labour is efficiency, that technical calculation is always superior to human judgment, and that the affairs of citizens are best conducted by experts. He was of the view that television is not a useful educational tool because it does not allow for the interaction that is necessary to effective learning.

Postman also believed that it was important to examine the downside of new technology as well as the upside. New technology destroys as well as creates; for example, printing fostered modern individuality but destroyed the medieval sense of community and social integration. His warning about the Internet was: “When we begin relying on the Internet for all of our news and information we will turn into a nation of zombies.” Greetings, fellow zombies.

There is something unbalanced about laws. If you break a law, you can get punished. But if you keep all the laws, no matter how carefully – if you never speed, and you never jaywalk and you always return your library books by the due date – there is no reward. The laws simply define how any respectable member of society is supposed to behave. Any failure to follow the least letter of the law makes you a deviant liable to be punished, but you do not deserve any reward for obeying the laws because all you have done is what you were supposed to do in the first place.

In chapter 3 of Paul’s letter to the Romans, Paul says that “all people have sinned and fall short of the glory of God”. It is a bit remarkable that most people seem to think that they can earn a place in heaven by obeying God’s laws, when Paul made it abundantly clear that if you fail to keep all of God’s laws then you no longer deserve a place in heaven. And the problem is that no-one except Jesus has ever managed to live life without breaking any of God’s laws.

Fortunately the story does not end there. We can be freely justified by God’s grace through the redemption provided by Christ Jesus. That is why we cannot boast about anything, because we have not done anything to boast about. We do not deserve to get to heaven. We have not made the grade. But Jesus has died to cancel out our sins, and so God lets us in if we have faith in Jesus.

As a patent attorney, I do not often see books about patents that are likely to be interesting to the general public. The Invisible Edge: Taking your Strategy to the Next Level Using Intellectual Property by Mark Blaxill and Ralph Eckardt is an exception. It contains some very interesting and engaging stories, and at the same time it makes a convincing case for the use of intellectual property as a central tool in gaining a competitive edge.

The book starts with a Tiger Woods story on the first page. Mark O’Meara had a good but not spectacular golfing career until 1998 when at the age of 41 he won the Masters and the British Open. His sudden form improvement was attributable to a new type of golf ball. O’Meara’s friend Tiger Woods started using the new type of ball, and then everyone else followed. The main ball manufacturer then started making the new type of ball, but they ran into trouble because the new ball was patented. I suspect that this story and others like it are tweaked for dramatic effect, but they certainly help to make the book interesting.

The authors say that you can determine the strength of a company’s patent position by the number of times that company’s patents have been cited by other patents; in my view the usefulness of information derived from patent citations is marginal at best. The authors deny that there is any problem with patent trolls; in my view the purpose of the patent system, to encourage innovation which creates economic growth and ultimately benefits everyone, is not assisted by someone who buys up old patents from a bankrupt company at a bargain price and then uses them to extract unreasonable royalties from others.

The book’s central thrust is about the importance of intellectual property, with particular emphasis on patents. I think that this message is a vital one. Almost all economic growth over the last 200 years has been attributable to technological improvements, and future economic growth will depend on more innovation. Patents have been important in encouraging innovation. The book does not acknowledge the many failings of the current patents system, but it is still a great read.

A video review of this book is available at my new site, BusinessLessons.org.

What is it that makes some countries rich, while others remain poor? If only we could identify the right elements, perhaps everyone could be rich. The United States became rich because of its managerial culture, which was built on a Puritan worldview, according to Kenneth and William Hopper in their book The Puritan Gift: Reclaiming the American Dream Amidst Global Financial Chaos.

The authors say that traditional American society had four characteristics:

1. A conviction that the purpose of life, however vaguely conceived, was to establish the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth;
2. An aptitude for the exercise of mechanical skills;
3. A moral outlook that subordinated the interests of the individual to the group; and
4. An ability to assemble, galvanise and marshal financial, material and human resources to a single purpose.

The authors say that management of major corporations in the United States reflected these virtues during the golden age of management which lasted until the early 1970s. The rate of economic growth in the US has deteriorated since the 1970s because of the advent of “professional management”, consisting of people who do not have technical engineering skills and who focus on financial manipulation rather than the core technical competence of an organisation.

The authors have still not forgiven the British for the American Revolutionary War. British management practices are universally condemned, the authors conveniently omitting to mention that Great Britain became wealthy long before the US did. Australian management practices are roundly condemned on the basis of the country’s British origins and the fact that Australian managers are wasting the country’s resources in a spendthrift way, because the authors once read in a book that Australia, with a land area just 19% smaller than that of the US, can only manage a sustainable population of 8 million people.

Notwithstanding these idiosyncrasies, this is a very useful and thought-provoking book. It provides a useful corrective to the prevalent but mistaken belief that economic growth is fuelled by a “greed is good” mentality. While I think that the book’s criticisms of modern management techniques are overstated, I think they do provide useful starting points for examining management techniques rather than just accepting them unequivocally.

A video review of this book is available at my new site BusinessLessons.org.

How often do you find that all the people in the room are nodding their heads and agreeing that radical change is essential, but then they go away and do absolutely nothing about it? It is really difficult to get other people to change when you do not have the power to compel them; it is often really difficult to get yourself to change when you know you should. Chip and Dan Heath explain why change is difficult and how you can tackle it in their book Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard.

Problems with change manifest themselves in many different ways. Sometimes other people fail to see the need for change that you see. Sometimes the amount of change required seems so enormous that people are unable to motivate themselves to get started. Sometimes change falls victim to procrastination. Sometimes old habits seem too deeply ingrained.

The good news is that the authors have clear, practical advice which tackles all of these situations. It involves a rider, an elephant and a path. If you can just direct the rational rider, motivate the emotional elephant and shape the path, you can make difficult changes happen.

The book is filled with interesting stories which are enjoyable to read while at the same time making the authors’ advice easy to understand and remember. I normally find good books either entertaining or useful; this is one of the rare ones that is both useful and entertaining.

A video review of this book is available at my new site, BusinessLessons.org.

This is the fourth in a series of posts discussing themes from The Aid Trap by Glenn Hubbard and William Duggan. In Chapter 2, the authors assert that England’s rise to prosperity began after adopting the Dutch model of commerce. William of Orange became king of England, Ireland and Scotland as a result of the Glorious Revolution in 1688. The London Stock Exchange opened just ten years later, in 1698.

Anglo-Dutch business practices quickly spread to America. In Europe, the feudal monarchies with their anti-business practices began to be overthrown in the 1800s in the “bourgeois revolution” in which the bourgeoisie, the business class, replaced feudal aristocrats. By the end of the 19th century, most people in Europe were employed by businesses. During the 20th century, business practices spread throughout the world largely through colonies of European nations.

During the 20th century, business encountered a new adversary: socialism, which was first proposed by Marx and Engels in 1848. Business does not reward people equally for their labours, and Marx viewed all profits as a form of theft. A pure socialist system essentially eliminates business by putting the means of production in the hands of the state. By the end of the 20th century, the general consensus was that socialism does not work as effectively as business-based systems of government.

It now looks as if sub-Saharan Africa will receive just half of the $25 billion in new foreign aid that was pledged for 2010 by wealthy nations at the Gleneagles Summit in 2005. Fifteen European countries pledged to increase their aid to 0.51% of GDP, but only nine of them will meet this target. Britain is expecting to increase its aid to 0.56% of GDP this year, despite the problems caused by the global economic crisis.

Britain does not provide budget support to Kenya because of concerns over government corruption, and British aid to Uganda has been frozen at 2007/8 levels, so the increase in East African funding is going to Tanzania. Unfortunately the latest indications from Tanzania are that aid is not working well there, either. In polite terms, “stated priorities, budget allocations and actual spending are not well aligned”.

Like many aid recipient nations, Tanzania suffers from sustained lack of financial discipline in the treatment of donor funds, and donors have not taken adequate steps to ensure proper use of funds. Foreign aid accounts for 10% of the country’s GDP and 40% of the government’s budget. Aid recipient countries often have trouble receiving and dealing with foreign aid when it accounts for more than 10% of the government’s budget.

Joseph Kony and his murderous cult, the Lord’s Resistance Army, have been haunting northern Uganda and neighbouring countries for 24 years. Their modus operandi involves riding into unarmed towns, shooting, slashing, maiming, ripping open and looting, kidnapping children to become recruits or sex slaves, and retreating to secret hideouts, ready to repeat the same sequence at another town. They live to strike terror into the hearts of others.

The Ugandan government’s response to this has wavered. On several occasions they have taken military action and succeeded in destroying some of the LRA forces, but the majority of LRA members have escaped and proceeded to take revenge by killing and maiming thousands more unarmed civilians. Peace agreements made by the LRA have never been kept. Foreign soldiers sent to fight the LRA have fared no better than Ugandan forces.

Now the US government is debating the LRA Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Bill, which proposes to offer the Ugandan government further assistance in eliminating the LRA. There is no doubt that the LRA is an evil which needs to be purged from the face of the earth, but I suspect that terminating the LRA will require more than just legislation in a distant land.