| COPENHAGEN, DENMARK
The World of Tycho Brahe, Denmark in Europe 1550–1600
Nationalmuseet, until 9 April, 2007 www.nationalmuseet.dk This eccentric exhibition on the Renaissance fascination with science takes as its focal point the astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546–1601), “the noble scholar with the silver nose”, and his collection of opulent astronomical machines. ______________________________ PARIS, FRANCE
BD Reporters
Centre Pompidou, until 23 April, 2007 www.centrepompidou.fr A sharp collection of travel art created by comic strip authors on vacation. Exploring the emerging nexus between comic strips (known in France as bande desinée, or BD), travel diaries and reporting, this exhibition puts forth the idea of a new kind of graphic journalism. ______________________________ VIENNA, AUSTRIA
Harun Farocki
Museum Moderner Kunst, until 27 May, 2007 www.mumok.at A showcase of wild child Harun Farocki’s trilogy Auge/Maschine (Eye/Machine) I/II/ III, which examines “intelligent” image-processing technologies and investigates the implications of how machines based on military imaging technologies operate independently of humans. Scary. ______________________________ BERLIN, GERMANY
Brücke Collection: Paintings and Sculptures
Brücke Museum, until 10 June, 2007 www.bruecke-museum.de A worthy “best of Brücke” selection of the finest paintings and sculptures by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Erich Heckel, Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein, Otto Mueller, Max Kaus and Anton Kerschbaumer. ______________________________ LONDON, ENGLAND
A New World: England’s First View of America
British Museum, until 17 June, 2007 www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk John White’s extraordinary 1580s watercolours gave the Elizabethan world its first glimpse of America. Hauntingly delicate, they represent the earliest visual record by an Englishman of the flora, fauna and people of America and helped shape the English perception of the New World. A must-see. ______________________________  Dancing into Battle
Nick Foulkes Weidenfeld & Nicolson, €25 ISBN 0297850786
Nick Foulkes’ witty look into the mores of 19th-century high society takes as its focus the Duchess of Richmond’s Ball before the most famous battle in European history, the Battle of Waterloo. Like so many accounts of historical events such as the Battle of the Somme, the Charge of the Light Brigade or the last days of Hitler, Dancing into Battle works its magic by capturing the buoyed expectations of a generation, followed by the inevitable carnage of a dreadful, brutal military confrontation that in the case of Waterloo saw the last flicker of Napoleon’s reign at the cost of 10,000 dead bodies. A wonderfully evocative narrative history. RL  Know-Who Based Entrepreneurship
Sigvald J. Harryson
Edward Elgar, €110 ISBN 1845421151
Dr Hans Jansson of the Baltic Business School asserts in the preface of this book that the author’s thesis transforms complexity into simplicity. In fact, it does the exact opposite. The book takes the old adage, “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know”, and the rule of thumb, “After four calls at the most, you usually get the right person on the phone” and turns them into an impenetrable mass of dreary academic guff and pseudo-corporate jargon. Or, according to the publisher’s blurb, it “reveals new synergies between external and internal knowledge networking”. But did it really need to be this long to make the point? BF  From Edison to iPod: Protect your Ideas and Make Money
Frederick Mostert
Dorling Kindersley, €23 ISBN 1405319267
It’s one thing to have entrepreneurial nous and to come up with ideas or products that will trounce the competition and make you a fortune. It really is quite another to be able to protect your intellectual property from imitators – especially these days, when the web enables information to be transmitted globally quicker than you can say Yahoo!. As this informed and readable book makes clear, start-ups and small businesses need – at the very least – a basic understanding of complex intellectual property laws and an awareness that even talking about their ideas can compromise their ownership rights. To crudely paraphrase the British wartime warning, idle talk costs money. JK  Developing Mental Toughness
Graham Jones and Adrian Moorhouse
Spring Hill, €20 ISBN 19058620203
The skinny on this book is that the very concept of mental toughness is a valuable addition to the armoury of any motivated person trying to achieve their life’s objectives, and not just business people. This reviewer got quite excited about the book in its earliest reaches; however, he ended it feeling that, as with all “how to” books, the wisdom it imparts is easier to read than to implement. Time and again, the box-outs that start “Over to Adrian” are the instructive narratives that give the book a soul and keep you turning the pages, rather than the theory sections, which dabble in transactional analysis or plod through other case studies that are eminently forgettable. It is simply interesting to follow Adrian Moorhouse, an ex-gold medal Olympic swimmer, through the many issues of mental toughness that he had to resolve as a young athlete. One then recognises half of them in one’s own workplace, where they dimly relate to the mundane reality of personnel problems, sales and trying to achieve strategic clarity above the background din. In a nutshell, argue the authors, business is like sport and the psychology of great performances apply to both. Pressure is good but its dark underbelly is stress, which can result in paralysis and underperformance. Mental toughness is a suite of skills and attitudes that enable you to thrive on pressure rather than succumb to stress. Thereafter every reader will take their own lesson from the book, but this reviewer found the section about self-determined and non-self-determined behaviour quite instructive from a manager’s perspective. If an employee is only in it for the paycheque they won’t bring much to the table, while at the opposite extreme the completely self-determined employee might find the workplace too constricting and may leave to do their own thing. The middle way involves a bit of both, of course, and when you have to plough through some work you’d just prefer to avoid, well, you’ll need some mental toughness. The book coincides with quite a lot of terrain covered by Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence, and Moorhouse admits that what lies at the heart of both is self-awareness. But self-awareness “is not sufficient, on its own, to deliver sustained high performance under pressure. That’s where mental toughness comes to the fore,” he states. “Pressure is nothing more than the shadow of great opportunity,” said Michael Johnson; that is what this book argues, too. RL  Mavericks at Work
William C Taylor and Polly LaBarre
Harper Collins, €20 ISBN 0007244061
“I didn’t read this book. I devoured it,” gushes Tom Peters on the garish cover. It’s easy to see why Mavericks should appeal to the man behind In Search of Excellence, bible to a generation of entrepreneurs. At a time when unprecedented competition and downward price pressures are making life tough for conventional business people, determination simply to “make money” or “succeed” is no longer enough. The key is to be unafraid of pulling in outsiders and respecting the freshness and originality they can bring. Most entrepreneurial successes highlighted are from the heartland of modern capitalism, the US – this makes the book especially valuable for European readers swamped with traditional business rubricks. It covers businesses ranging from Potbelly Sandwich Works, which has gone from a single operation in Chicago to an emerging “anti-chain” of 100-plus shops, to media giants HBO and Pixar, which have transformed the television and animated film businesses. One thing all share is a focus not so much on tricky hard factors – price, quality and features – but on soft ones that make them stand out and connect with the customer. The most interesting example of maverick thinking is Goldcorp, which, by turning conventional industry practice on its head, transformed its unpromising 55,000-acre Ontario-based Red Lake goldmine into the world’s richest. Fed up at the continued failure to find rich gold seams and arguing that the pace of change in this “old, tired industry” was glacial, CEO Rob McEwen horrified colleagues by putting all Goldcorp’s geological data (some 50 years’ worth) on the internet, offering cash prizes for the most interesting and persuasive drilling proposals. This decision to “tap into the intellectual capital of the world” enabled McEwen to exploit a seam as rich as that which would eventually be found at Red Lake. Although other factors played a role in Red Lake’s transformation – not least considerable luck and the rising price of gold, which reached an 18-year high in 2005 – Taylor and LaBarre conclude that the maverick approach was key. Those who placed their trust in it have been richly rewarded: by the end of 2005, a 1993 $100,000 investment in Microsoft shares was worth $895,000, while the same money invested in Goldcorp was worth $2.9m, a 30-fold increase. If you need proof that “thinking outside the box” really is more than a cliché, look no further. JK |