On leadership, continuity, and the common good

The public interest. The public good. The common good. All these terms describe ways of thinking about our collective selves and our shared interests that transcend our memberships of such groups as families, teams, and workplaces that typically inform our understanding of who we are and pattern our expectations and experience of the social world. Whereas groups such as these are ‘concrete’ in the sense that we interact with many of the members of these groups, know the group’s defining features, and can recognise exemplary members, the community of individual citizens to whom concepts like the public good apply is more abstract. Indeed, we know such communities not through direct face-to- face interaction with their members but rather indirectly, through our imaginations. It is not for nothing that Benedict Anderson (1983) described such collective, temporally continuous entities as ‘imagined communities’. In this article, I explore the idea that certain of our current cultural ideals and practices may be inimical to our ability to imagine and experience ourselves as members of these imagined, enduring communities. In particular, I explore the idea that in our prevailing culture of flux, impermanence, and uncertainty, characterised by Bauman (2012) as ‘liquid’ modernity, we have fallen out of the habit of thinking about our ourselves as members of an imagined community of citizens with common interests who act with collective purpose in the service of these interests. Given that the type of imagined community necessary to overcome the kinds of problems that deform the public good is precisely the type of collective identity that is neither valorised nor cultivated in liquid modernity, we find ourselves less capable of acting in concert with one another to enhance the public good than we ideally should be. Notwithstanding this state of affairs, it affords us an opportunity to re-imagine the common good and to enact, entrench and expand the practice of leadership in its service

Swinburne leadership survey: index of leadership for the greater good

Summary The Swinburne Leadership Survey is the flagship research program of the Swinburne Leadership Institute that examines Australian’s beliefs about the nation’s leaders and citizens. Conducted in late 2014, the Swinburne Leadership Survey is a benchmark study and underpins our goal of contributing to the renewal of Leadership for the Greater Good in Australia. The aim of the Swinburne Leadership Survey is to benchmark public opinion about: The trustworthiness and competence of leaders across different social and economic sectors The responsibilities of leaders in contributing to the Greater Good How well national political leaders are delivering on these responsibilities How Australians would like our leaders to address our major challenges The roles ordinary citizens can play as change agents or local leaders of change for the Greater Good The Survey provides Australians with a rigorous snapshot of leadership in Australia and, over time, a powerful tool to measure the direction in which Leadership for the Greater Good in Australia is heading. The inaugural Swinburne Leadership Survey and Index of Leadership for the Greater Good will be released in April 2015. The Swinburne Leadership Institute will conduct the Survey annually, to measure changes and trends in Australian perceptions of leadership

Auctioning Rough Diamonds: A Competitive Sales Process for BHP Billiton’s Ekati Diamonds

We describe a new approach for selling rough diamonds through competitive auctions. The classical approach of De Beers—giving each customer a bag of stones and a take-it-or-leave-it price—worked well in near monopoly circumstances, but is ill-suited for competitive producers. Competitive producers, like BHP Billiton, benefit from getting the diamonds to those who value them the most. Beginning in 2008, BHP Billiton introduced a simple auction process to assign its Ekati diamonds to the highest bidders at competitive market prices. A Spot auction, ten times per year, is used to establish prices for each of nineteen deals of diamonds grouped by size, color, and quality. A Term auction allows customers to lock in a long-term supply commitment at prices indexed to future Spot auctions. A Specials auction, two or three times per year, prices large stones. The auctions use an ascending-clock format in which prices increase for each product until there is no excess demand. This approach allows customers to discover market prices, while managing portfolio and budget constraints. The approach has proven remarkably successful in pricing and allocating the mine’s output even in the face of the global financial crisis.diamond auctions, market design

Extreme nesting in the conformal loop ensemble

The conformal loop ensemble $\operatorname {CLE}_{\kappa}$ with parameter $8/3<\kappa<8$ is the canonical conformally invariant measure on countably infinite collections of noncrossing loops in a simply connected domain. Given $\kappa$ and $\nu$, we compute the almost-sure Hausdorff dimension of the set of points $z$ for which the number of CLE loops surrounding the disk of radius $\varepsilon$ centered at $z$ has asymptotic growth $\nu\log (1/\varepsilon )$ as $\varepsilon \to0$. By extending these results to a setting in which the loops are given i.i.d. weights, we give a CLE-based treatment of the extremes of the Gaussian free field.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/14-AOP995 in the Annals of Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aop/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Leadership tools for wicked problems

Leadership for the Greater Good is not easy to achieve. Many of the issues leaders face are so complex that they have been called ‘wicked problems’ – not in the sense of being evil, but because they seem almost intractable. Patience, insight and collaboration are required to resolve wicked problems and, even then, many preferred solutions often lead to unintended consequences that demand new actions that, unfortunately, too often descend in a cycle of quick-fix solutions. Policy failure and crisis management often result, as seen in wicked problem areas such as climate change, resources tax policy, refugee responses, and Indigenous health. This Working Paper utilises Grint’s 2008 model of critical, tame and wicked problems to differentiate between the needs and uses for command, management and leadership approaches to the exercise of authority in working with them. The paper suggests that the increasing complexity of the problems leaders in all sectors of society are facing, together with the increasing volatility and uncertainty of contemporary social, business and political affairs, demand special efforts to develop and enhance leadership for wicked problems. Five tools for working with wicked problems are suggested: collaboration, character, continuity of commitment, competence and communication

Four-Dimensional Twisted Group Lattices

Four-dimensional twisted group lattices are used as models for space-time structure. Compared to other attempts at space-time deformation, they have two main advantages: They have a physical interpretation and there is no difficulty in putting field theories on these structures. We present and discuss ordinary and gauge theories on twisted group lattices. We solve the free field theory case by finding all the irreducible representations. The non-abelian gauge theory on the two-dimensional twisted group lattice is also solved. On twisted group lattices, continuous space-time translational and rotational symmetries are replaced by discrete counterparts. We discuss these symmetries in detail. Four-dimensional twisted group lattices can also be used as models for non-trivial discrete compactifactions of certain ten-dimensional spaces.Comment: 31 pages (no figures) in Late

Fuel tests with Illinois coals

Cover-title.At head of title: University of Illinois bulletin. vol. III, no. 22."Publications of the Engineering experiment station": p. 68

Persisting mobile phone use while driving and possible solutions for New Zealand

In New Zealand the use of hand-held phones while driving was prohibited in 2009, but ‘hands-free’ phones are still permitted. We recently presented the results of an observational study into mobile phone among Wellington drivers at a conference (for details see the proceedings). The main findings were that out of 8335 cars systematically observed at traffic lights and 9520 cars in moving traffic (each at three different Wellington locations), the use of mobile phones was 1.87% (95%CI: 1.60-2.18) and 1.34% (95%CI: 1.13-1.59) respectively