The plural of anecdote is not data

A nice article with this title by Deborah Bull in the FT. A former leading dancer and creative director of the Royal Opera House, she is now director, cultural partnerships at King's College London.

I particularly like this sentence:

"Research is like live performance: it can change your worldview but it might not always turn out the way you expected."

A very refreshing look at the value and impact of research from a different perspective.

I have been reflecting on what is now referred to as the "troubled Co-operative Group" (the space station Mir was always described as troubled in its later days: I find it odd to think of things rather than people being troubled). The unfolding saga has plenty of headline-grabbing content. This is one of the better articles I've read. But characterising the situation as a clash of values seems to obscure what I see as an illustration of the blurred boundary between governance and management. 

Setting aside the difficulty Lord Myners seems to have had with reconciling the co-operative structure with what is perceived in his world as sensible corporate governance arrangements, I wonder whether the group's woes are rather more about poor business decisions than board structures. Even boards which are constituted and peopled according to best corporate governance practice can make bad business decisions. Not every business crisis is about corporate governance.

For the Co-op, it may be that the time is right to consider a rather different structure. The case for a type of post-board arrangement is well argued by Kelly Alces.

But I wonder if there are other co-operative organisations that have grappled with similar issues and found away to resolve them. I haven't seen any reported. Sometimes anecdotes are a route into data.

Epiphany

Two more weeks till I finish work, hand in my office key and parking permit and head off into the sunlit uplands of whatever comes next. This morning an email arrived from the library saying that a book I had suggested for purchase has arrived and will be kept for me to see. This is the book. It looks interesting, I think it will be useful for students and there may be a point in the future when I will find it useful to know that is accessible in the library (I'll still have library access after I retire). But, as I contemplated when I could conveniently get to the library to collect it, I realised that I didn't need to. And with that realisation came another: I can cut down on my reading.

A colleague recently described me as a voracious reader. She based this view on the number of emails I send to colleagues suggesting that something I've come across may be of interest to them. It's true, I spend a huge amount of my time reading for work. I have several ToC alerts set up for journals relevant to my work and when they arrive I follow up anything interesting immediately. But I could just as easily search for specific keywords when I really need to. So I shall cancel them, which will reduce my email traffic as well.

I also pick up a great deal of reading via Twitter. If you're selective about who you follow it's a very useful way of keeping up to date with debates in areas of academic interest. But the errors made by journalists irritate me very much. Here's today's example: you'd think Reuters' journalists could distinguish between auditing and bookkeeping!  Some financial journalists are also prone to report research findings inaccurately or report "research" which is not peer-reviewed, all for the sake of a catchy headline. And then I feel compelled to point out their errors and spend time engaged in discussions which are pointless because the inaccurate stuff has been published and won't be changed and the journalists are, by and large, unlikely to change their ways. So I shall cut down on my Twitter reading and lower my blood pressure at the same time.

If I am in future slower to discover the frontiers of knowledge in my areas of research interest, will that matter?

Some encouraging research on earnings quality

A tweet alerted me to this study. Following the links to SSRN you'll find not only the paper but links to teaching slides and another relevant paper. It's very encouraging to see researchers going to the horse's mouth and asking CFOs about it, rather than using proxy measures or experiments with MBA students. But it doesn't look as if these papers have yet been published in peer-reviewed journals. Is this another example of prejudice against research of this nature?

(I've tweeted this using the very useful  TwitLonger, which I have only just discovered.)