Work less do more

I record this because it's fascinating and pertinent to life today in so many ways.

They thought about it and decided they’d rather hold the team together. So we went down to a thirty-two-hour-a-week schedule for everyone furing a down time. We took everybody’s hours and salary down - executives too.
... two surprises.
First, productivity did not decline. I swear to God we get as much out of them at thirty-two hours as we did at forty. So it’s not a bad business decision. But second, when economic conditions improved, we offered them one hundred percent time again. No one wanted to go back!

I can't help saying that I could really relate to that. I've been partially employed for two years now and I love that fact that I have time to do things I like. We may not be rich in money terms but we do get by. When it comes to the prospect of more normal employment, I am most dreading the long stints at one kind of work, the loss of variety and the loss of control over my own time. I can't help suspecting that those may be the kinds of issues for the people in that study.
Via Worldchanging.
Positive Sharing � The cult of overwork (again):
Filed in: work, productivity, hours, overwork

The Myth of Religious Superiority

Just read this and posted a brief review at my booklogging site. May expand on it in due course. It's given me a lot to think about.
booklogging: The Myth of Religious Superiority

FIFA Creates PR Disaster For Anheuser-Busch

Just noticed that some of my earlier posta on Dutch trouserlessness and corporate sponsorship has bee picked up by a commentator on PR ...
PR Communications: FIFA Creates PR Disaster For Anheuser-Busch

TM or just M?

This is one of my 'someone else saying what I've been saying' posts [also here and in a way, here].

I’ve not been a regular meditator for many years. But I can drop my blood pressure significantly if I use my mantra for five minutes in a doctor’s office. And I can use it to help me get to sleep. YMMV, as they say in the car ads.
But is there anything special about the TM mantra? That’s a question this study does not address. What if any short nonsense word works? Or if a non-nonsense word works? If so, then it’s not “TM” that’s helping. Just “M.”

In fact, theistic meditation scores better still.
Transcendental Meditation :: TM Survey?:Filed in: TM, meditation, health, mantra

take off your trousers, they're offending our sponsor

I am not amused, in fact I'm annoyed by this. If it had been a governmental thing, people would have been rightly outraged by the fascist-seeming action, but it's about commercial sponsorship, so it's okay. What am I on about?

Critics say the decision to make more than 1,000 Dutch fans strip off last Friday is evidence of the extraordinary lengths to which Fifa has gone to protect the interests of World Cup sponsors - at the expense of ordinary fans. Fifa, however, says it has done nothing wrong and is entitled to defend itself against what it calls "ambush marketing".

I say "tough luck corporate sponsors", money shouldn't be able to buy the right to subject people to this kind of indignity. At the very least these people should have been offered alternative netherwear. In fact I think they should sue the sponsor who insisted on this and campaign to boycott their wares. So watch out Budweiser, I'm off Bud now.

I'm afraid ambush marketting may not be nice, but corporations are going to have to recognise that mental space and civil liberties are tied up with one another. There are issues in here that concern Christians: freedom of conscience is involved, loving neighbours does not involve humiliating them especially for such trivial reasons. More importantly, where could this kind of control freakery end? Potentially the same arguments could be used to strip Christians of faith symbols or to censure such things as crossing oneself. It only takes corporations to become aware of how radically anti-consumerist Christianity can be and for that to be in the public mind somewhat and we will be suspect in public life where sponsorship and the right to propagandise are being bought and sold ... we will be a threat to their messages and to the anthropology and to the life-purpose they wish to construe for human beings through the connotations and implicatures of their brands, messages and use of symbol. Too hyped? Too 'thin-end-of-the wedge'? Maybe, but then so many big things have grown up from little origins that no-one thought could lead where they did.

Guardian Unlimited Football | World Cup 2006 | The new World Cup rule: take off your trousers, they're offending our sponsor:
Filed in: marketting, sponsorship, football, FIFA

Evangelical Shifts

I've been thinking lately that the term evangelical now seems so firmly associated with knee-jerk reactionary uncharitableness that I can scarcely bring myself to take the label any more, certainly not without qualifiers like 'catholic'. So I was interested to read this.

Recently, I had a long chat with an accomplished Asian theologian who is also bishop of my ecclesiastical denomination. I lamented to him that I have often been accused of being "liberal", "slippery", or "non-evangelical" simply because I suffer a discontentment arising from what I deem to be an Evangelical bankruptcy. My theological positions often place me at the margins of Evangelicalism. He seemed to fully identify with my lament, and responded by saying, "Yes, this places us at the margins of Evangelicalism, but also at the forefront." He went on to mutter something akin to saying that there is often a price to pay for being at the forefront or an agent of change.

It's made me wonder if we need a specifically evangelical equivalent of the 'progressive Christian network'; a progressive evangelical commonweal ...
Filed in: evangelicalism, labelling, reformationGenerous Orthodoxy ThinkTank: Evangelical Shifts:

USA football spectacular

I can hardly believe it. A day after the USA football team [that's the one that plays the game that uses feet most - 'football' that's mostly about throwing and carrying a ball doesn't merit the name] played Italy and I still haven't come across an appreciation for the fluid and beautiful game they largely played. Okay, they didn't beat Italy, but they didn't lose either and given that Italy are a legacy great football side the USA boys did well. In fact they deserved to win. Especially as an overzealous referee robbed them of a player and they ended up playing with one man less and still gave the Italians a run around. Your guys played good, flowing, gutsy football, nearly won and your press seems to be silent. ...

Why do I care? Because I want the USA to join the rest of the world. This national downgrading of 'soccer' is like US foreign policy; tending to isolationism. The talking up of merely local games it 'world series' etc smacks of hubris. Come on USA, you can do this game well, give it your support.
See also