simply should be published

A typical Monday morning (coordination meeting) was followed by a lunchtime visit from John Harper, ‘my publisher’ (his website his here). I am slowly but steadily penning a new book for his collection (about the European institutions), this time about the European Economic and Social Committee. It will be an academic textbook in time-honoured tradition. I am convinced that all of the institutions deserve to be better known (it was what led me to write my books about the Parliament and the Council). The simple existence of a textbook is one way of doing this. At the moment, if you want to know about the way the Committee works, you can only refer to the Committee’s website. That’s fine, as a factual basis, but there are simply no analytical reference works available. It’s always a pleasure to see John, who is an old-fashioned publisher – and I mean that as a compliment. For example, he has just published a book by Anita Pollack, a former MEP, entitled Wreckers or Builders?, which is a history of Labour MEPs, 1979-1999. He published it simply because, in his opinion, it is a piece of history that should be published. It’s good to know that such publishers exist.

A busy but productive week was pleasurably rounded off by a performance of the Brussels Light Opera Company’s The Pirates of Penzance. We are fortunate in Brussels to have such a thriving and professional (though amateur) production company. This was a well-sung (several excellent voices) and well-performed production that had the sprogs in stitches on several occasions. Pirates remains an extraordinarily witty piece of literary and musical writing. As often with amateur (so-called) productions, I had the pleasure of recognising several members of the cast, including one of the policemen, Simon, who was an almost direct contemporary at the European University Institute over twenty years ago now (that’s him on the right in the picture). But I never leave a Gilbert and Sullivan production without a faint sense of sadness. I grew up near Gilbert’s house, Grimsdyke. He drowned in the ornamental pond there. Now a hotel, it is still an atmospheric place, but the gardens, the pond and the menagerie that Gilbert built up have all since been claimed back by the surrounding woods. I have walked through those woods so many times and, when I come to what remains of the pond (the boathouse was burnt down by vandals in my youth), I hear faintly on the breeze the refrain ‘For I am a pirate king!’

We went to see 2012 this weekend. Not bad, not bad. An absurd story line – and, not surprisingly, very similar to Emmerich’s two previous films in this genre, Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow. If you like special effects, these were very special. However, I think N° 2 sprog summed things up nicely when he remarked that special effects are only ever special the first time you see them. The second time around your eye is already noting where the computer-generated stuff is spliced in and any lazy repeated use of background…

Pelliza da Volpedo

I spent this morning, together with the President, in a conciliation meeting with the Committee’s trades unions. As the President, a trades unionist who cut his teeth in negotiations in the Italian car industry (FIAT) and with a certain well known Pellizza da Volpedo image on his wall (see picture), it must have felt strange to be on the other side of the table. But what it did mean was that there was complete respect and a cheerful atmosphere. It was one of those meetings where the sides lay out their arguments  – a bit like a warm-up in squash or tennis. In any case, we’re all nicely warmed up now for the match!

The Warrior

A few days back (12 November) I posted a piece about an adventurous maritime past on my mother’s side of the family (my maternal great-grandfather was a ship’s captain and was shipwrecked in the Hudson Bay). Well, historically-speaking and for obvious reasons, England has always been a maritime nation and so I shouldn’t be surprised that there was some contact with the sea among my ancestors. But now my aunt, the one doing genealogical research into our roots, has produced the service records of my paternal grandfather and great-grandfather and, lo and behold, they were both seadogs as well. In fact, within a few years of each in the 1870s and 1880s, they served on one of the British navy’s more illustrious battleships, the Warrior. It was Britain’s first iron-hulled and armoured battleship. It was powered by steam and sail and was the pride of Queen Victoria’s navy. The picture gives some sense of it but you can get a better sense than that, for the ship is now on permanent display in Portsmouth’s Historic Dockyard. I have already visited the ship, but I wasn’t then aware of this personal connection. You can take a virtual tour of the ship here. Going below decks, you can see where the crew (over 700 of them!) slept and ate, my forefathers among them. It’s a strange feeling.

This morning I attended a meeting of the administrative board of the European Personnel Selection Office (EPSO). As it’s Director, David Bearfield, explained, it is currently undergoing an ‘upside down and inside out’ reform process, with the full backing of all of the European Union’s institutions. The scale of the challenge it faces is massive and it is crucial for the EU and its institutions that the reform process should succeed fully. Happily, Bearfield was able to report ‘considerable progress on a broad front’. The figures he cited are dauntingly impressive. For example, in 2008 EPSO organised no less than 92 open competitions involving 70,000 applicants and producing 2000 laureats. One of the points on our agenda was a report on open competitions for linguists. An impressive transparency (I’ll try and get hold of a copy and post it) demonstrated the sheer weight of language provision in the administrations of all of the EU’s institutions, from the largest to the smallest. The total number of colleagues working in languages at administrator or assistant level is around 8,000. Putting that the other way around, though, when you think that there are 23 working languages, and that the figure includes interpreters and translators, you could argue that the number is impressively small.

Thumbs up for progress

A while back I read an interview with Sebastian Coe in which he explained that his philosophy is to work in such a way that progress is made on something, somewhere (for which he is responsible), every day. I think that is an excellent tip and I have adopted it. It not only provides a good basic approach to the day (where can I make a difference? how can I help progress?) but it also guarantees a good end to the day, since the progress made can be measured and reflected upon. Today was a five star progress day. This afternoon the President organised a coordination meeting on a thorny question that has been bedevilling the Committee for over six years now. It’s a politically sensitive issue where there are no easy answers and a lot of potential pitfalls. Nevertheless, he was able to close the meeting with a series of clear and unanimously approved operational conclusions that provide direction and underlying strategy. Like everybody else in the meeting room, I suspect, I left with a warm feeling of progress made. Excellent!

Pudding, proof of

This morning we had the usual coordination meeting at Directors’ level and then, this afternoon, a meeting of the Political Monitoring Group (PMG) which oversees the joint services that the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions share. I won’t bore you again with my personal view about the revolutionary and pioneering nature of this sharing arrangement but I think the success of it is a tribute to the goodwill on all sides and at all levels to make it work, and to make it work well. The PMG is there to provide oversight but it is also there to deal with any problems that bubble up to it because they couldn’t be resolved at services level. So far, no major problems have bubbled up and that is the proof, as they say, of the pudding.

Do the right thing

Russ Ackoff passed away on 29 October. ‘Who?’ you might ask, for he was less well known than many another so-called ‘management guru’. You can read about him here. In the meantime, though, here is one of his inspirational pieces of wit and wisdom. ‘All of our problems arise out of doing the wrong thing righter. The more efficient you are at doing the wrong thing, the wronger you become. It is much better to do the right thing wronger than to do the wrong thing righter.’ This is so true, and yet at times it is so difficult for those who, in all good faith and conscientiousness, are diligently trying to do the wrong thing righter, to simply understand it.

Investment opportunity ahead

In my little speech yesterday in Palermo I stressed the fact that, whilst we were honouring two noble and courageous local causes, the problems they were addressing – poverty and organised crime – were problems all of Europe had to face. As if to echo these sentiments, today’s edition of the Financial Times carries an article explaining how the ‘Mafia rushed to fresh profits through gap in the Berlin Wall’. According to the report, the Mafia (and other criminal organisations) saw the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Iron Curtain as a major investment opportunity and was not slow to profit. This also confirmed a theme Don Ciotti vigorously stressed. ‘There are those who say that the mafia is something of a benign organisation because the money it extorts is fed back into the local communities; not at all! not at all!’