Iain Cameron's Diary
"Click here to access the Fruitful Album" - Click here to visit Music for the Highveld Project


The Highveld Project

Get your own
 diary at DiaryLand.com! contact me older entries

2002-11-29 - 8:58 a.m.

On the way back to Lean-town, Paul Jones played Free�s Mr Big � I remember they sounded different at the time. They sound even more different 30 years later � now they sound like jazz to me � although the metre is slow and �heavy� there is a skip in there which supports the freedom that the vocalist, the guitarist and the bassplayer utilise at different points. At the same time the rhythms are incredibly thought through � they were probably all under 20 at the time. This must be the last blues band before heavy metal became the paradigm for power trios.

There was another recording from about the same time of the Streatham blues mafia � Joanne Kelly and her brother (I think on piano). Who on earth was the guitarist on the recording � utterly glorious � within the genre but totally individual and as fresh as if it was recorded yesterday. Simon Prager who I bumped into in the early 1990s was friends with all these people. In the late 1950s when blues artists like Leadbelly started to come over, then the blues clique in Streatham would look after them. Simon has actually played with Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee. He walked into my office in Belgrave Rd and asked if I would like to see his Martin � well only one answer to that.

I am listening to the piece which has become Story 11 � at least in interim terms � Gilbert may well put this infant down as he is the owner of the seed from which it has grown. I have managed to put in the odd 5 or 10 minutes on it at various points through the day. It is a bleak dialogue between the guitar and the ensemble � so in grand terminology it�s a mini-concerto. It has thematic structure � partly for reasons I would rather not go out and partly because of the way the original guitar was conceived. It is a kind of restrained Gothic and I am really pretty taken with it today. Who knows tomorrow?

The big discovery today on the course is that the advent of TS 16949 as the entrance ticket to global automotive supply chains poses an enormous challenge to top management. Not in the sense that they may not acquire the standard � they will find a way of doing that. Rather the standard provides an opportunity to become genuine �leaning organisations� in the sense in which Harvard�s Peter Senge defined it in the Fifth Discipline in the early 1990s � but in order for this to happen they have to start thinking in meta-systemic terms. Its no accident that the German social worker Suzanne has picked this stuff up � it is at root about the way trust underpins information flows.

Suzanne was banging on about leadership at the critical juncture in the course � I was sketching a model using two axes - logical analysis versus values on one axis and general possibility versus particular facts on the other. If four quadrants are thus defined and a learning organisation has permeable membranes across each of the four key boundaries then the critical boundary to consider is the one between the particuar fact/values segment on the one hand. These are the auditors � they take a special pride in uncovering the facts and won�t be compromised by difficult or uncomfortable facts (at least that�s the theory). Their work has to flow through to the people who are in adjacent segment � where the ruling considerations are future possibility and the emerging values that might reside there � this is the visionary side of leadership � but it has to reconcile itself to working off the world as it is in all its messiness and goriness � which people mostly want to ignore or bury. Obviously the visionary leaders will be motivated by charting a path from here to the kinds of possibility that are set out (say) in the technology route map which we got Cambridge University Engineering Dept to do for us (with a pretty hefty price tag). BUT that path needs to connect with a true assessment of what the present state is � not the kind of �spin� that has become legitimised in the last five or six years. Baudrillard and pataphysics swim in these waters biting people�s legs off at the knees.

There was a discussion over lunch of whether Mbeki was authentically genocidal � the person who had lived in SA had absolutely no doubts on the issue.

My next stage is to see if I can make sense of Honey�s learning styles in all of this

previous - next