Dear Tim
The deadline for OH news submissions for Follow Up! magazine is this Friday 31 March.
The OH News pages of the magazine are always the most popular and it’s great to see them packed with all manner of achievements from members of the OH community across the globe.
Have you started a new job, were you promoted, did you get married or engaged, have you had a child, received an honour, written a book, graduated, founded a new business, got involved in a charity, produced a play, directed a film, received a sporting contract or won an award?
Please send your news, in up to 100 words, along with print quality (300dpi resolution) images to Digital Communications Officer Emma Pinto at oldharrovians@harrowschool.org.uk.
Opt out of receiving a printed copy of Follow Up! magazine
We know from the recent OH Survey that some of you would rather receive the magazine solely in digital form and so we’d like to invite you to to opt out of receiving a printed copy of the magazine should you wish. Email Emma at oldharrovian@harrowschool.org.uk with Opt Out Follow Up! in the subject line.
In the meantime, see below for the latest issues.
We look forward to hearing from you.
With best wishes from the Hill
The Harrow Association Team
All posts by timothyrobarts
Yoga by Emmanuel Carrere
“Outrageously Good”
This book is wonderful and you absolutely have to read it, and I say that as a man who has not been able to touch his toes for a decade and who flees for all mention of wellness like a startled horse. Writing this wonderful transcends such petty barriers.
I’m reluctant to go into specifics as I did not know what to expect and want you to feel what I felt as this unfurled before me. But one passage stands out so much that I need to talk about it, so I will make an exception.
Towards the end of the book, a piece of music is mentioned and viewed in text as a Youtube video. This video exists and we are none too subtly nudged towards watching it ourselves (this sort of audience participation would normally be met with a steely indifference from me, but Carrère had me in the palm of my hand at this point, I would have given him a major organ had he suggested it). Watching this clip alongside the author, and it really does feel like that, was one of the single greatest literary experiences of my life, a perfect few minutes. There is magic in these pages.
I love the indiscipline of this, the honesty, the divine humanness of it all. The best book I have read so far this year.
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An arresting and deeply contemplative self-portrait of a man forced to face himself anew as tragic events unfold in his life, Yoga is a powerful and revelatory memoir from the acclaimed author of The Adversary.
This is a book about yoga. Or at least, it was.
January 2015. High on literary success and familial bliss, Emmanuel Carrere embarks on a rigorous ten-day meditative retreat in rural France in search of clarity and material for his next book, which he thinks will be a subtle, upbeat introduction to yoga. But his trip is cut short, and he is brought down to earth with a thud as he returns to a Paris in turmoil in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack.
From then on, Carrere’s life begins to unravel, along with his novel-in-progress. He is diagnosed with Bipolar II Disorder and is sectioned to a psychiatric hospital for a four-month stint, where he is subject to electroshock therapy. His marriage crumbles, he is struck by grief at the death of a close friend and is haunted by a love affair with a mysterious woman who disappeared from his life. Pushed to the edge of sanity and forced to reckon with his identity as a man and a writer, Carrere sets out on a life of action instead of meditation.
This is a book that embraces the Yin and Yang of life: the pull between life and death, desire and despair, presence and absence, fight and flight. It is a book about a world and a man in tumult, and about how surprisingly far practising meditation – and writing about it – can take us in life. With raw honesty and humour, Yoga gives us the self-portrait of a man struggling to live with himself and others, by one of our greatest and most surprising international writers.
Publisher: Vintage Publishing
ISBN: 9781787333215
Number of pages: 320
Weight: 437 g
Dimensions: 222 x 144 x 31 mm
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Intelligence History Online Library.
HMC-IT Chess Forum (Books)
Robarts.com Counter-surveillance
Re David Nish about transforming Standard Life /
THE INTERVIEW: Jeff Prestridge speaks to David Nish about transforming Standard Life.
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By Jeff Prestridge.
Updated: 21:54, 12 September 2010.
Podcast from Richard Charnock.
Rory Montgomerie (Client Portfolio Manager)
They’re knocking down the offices on the executive floor of Standard Life’s headquarters on Lothian Road, Edinburgh.
The demolition is all part of chief executive David Nish’s plan to turn the 185-year-old financial giant – six million customers and £179 billion of assets – into a more open organisation. He is fond of the word ‘transformation’.
It is his first interview since taking over less than a year ago from Sandy Crombie, the man who steered the business through a difficult demutualisation in 2006.
New broom: David Nish is the force behind a catalogue of dramatic changes at Standard Life’s Edinburgh HQ.
It was a bold appointment by a board that in the past had always opted for actuaries who were company ‘lifers’ such as Crombie, Iain Lumsden and the late Scott Bell.
Nish, 51, is not an actuary (and is pleased to let people know) but an accountant who had worked at Standard Life for only three years before formidable chairman Gerry Grimstone gave him the top job and told him to bring the company into the Brussels threat to merchant navy defiant: The Red Duster flag of the merchant navy age.
Nish comes from Glasgow – and still lives there with wife Caroline – which makes him an even bigger ‘outsider’. ‘I’m from the wrong side of Scotland,’ he says. He’s been married 27 years and has two children, both at university.
Judging by the physical changes at HQ, Nish’s wish for corporate glasnost is being put into action. Out are large executive offices with oak doors. In comes open plan. ‘I will have an eighth of the space Sandy had,’ he says with pride. ‘When I joined I had to walk 50 yards before I could find another colleague.’
Out also is the absurd policy requiring staff to enter the building through the basement, leaving the front reception for clients and the company executives.
Nish, a former PricewaterhouseCoopers partner and finance director of ScottishPower, has also got rid of the rule which reserves the top floor for board meetings and hospitality.
‘Someone deemed that staff could never be located above the executives, but that’s ending,’ he says. ‘We’re turning the floor over to staff training.’
However, 600 staff – 480 at headquarters – have been axed as part of a £100 million cost-cutting programme. The revolving door has also caught a dozen top executives, though Nish has made an equal number of senior appointments from within and externally.
Nish says this is necessary to make the company leaner and more nimble. ‘Standard Life is like a dam’, he explains. ‘There is pent-up energy behind it. We need to remove the bricks to allow the energy to flow. There is a lot of skill in this organisation but it’s underdeveloped.
‘We don’t need new ideas. We need to speed up our metabolic rate, improve the lead time it takes to get products to market, generate a stronger performance culture within the organisation and work out how we can best create shareholder value driven off doing best for our customers.’
The executive team has been shaken up to let individuals take decisions. ‘I can’t make them all. We’ve got good people here but they’ve never been allowed to do things,’ he says.
‘Only last week, Ronnie Collard, head of customer service, said to me, “At last I can get on with the issues I’ve wanted to tackle for the past 20 years but have never been allowed to do.” I need to mobilise all 10,000 staff to make decisions.’
Then, rather surprisingly, he says: ‘I’m not running an insurance company. We’re a long- term savings and investments business. I want to distance ourselves from being viewed as an insurer – of being slow, not consumer-oriented and not understanding the long-term savings market.’
Nish says regulatory change, Government policy and the impact of the financial crisis means that the focus of the next decade will be savings, not insurance.
‘We must construct appropriate savings and investment vehicles to help people accumulate for retirement,’ he says. ‘If we do this, Britain can be a genuinely exciting place for Standard Life to do business.’
Nish says the company’s thriving asset management arm will help it. The business has been boosted by the recent acquisition of hedge fund specialist Aida Capital and a tie-up with Japanese bank Chuo Mitsui.
Nish is also keen to break the company’s long-standing dependency on financial advisers. Although he intends to give advisers all the support they need to make the jump from being paid by commission to being fee-charging – a regulatory requirement – he wants to explore other sales avenues, such as direct to the customer and through employers.
‘I want to bring the outside world into Standard Life,’ he says. ‘We’re doing something we’ve never done before, which is talk to customers.
‘We don’t serve 70 per cent of the market, those people who don’t use advisers. That’s daft.’
Nish’s enthusiasm for the savings market may not be shared by some of Standard Life’s big rivals such as Prudential, which are increasingly looking East, though Standard Life has successful business operations in China and India, to which Nish is committed.
But more than ever, Nish wants to be at the heart of a British savings boom.
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Where is Flight 370 and how this should never happen again /
Russian Evgeniy Bogachev sought over cybercrime botnet.
Adam Phones Ltd. /
Robarts.com Social Networking Protocols / Blog.
http://www.robarts.com/social/discussion/view/59/social-networking-protocols
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http://www.robarts.com/social/blog/all
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