Blog
Euro Zone
We have been on our travels again. October saw us in Frankfurt, for the Book Fair, promoting our materials, working with friends and making new ones. It’s always a fun time, but the spaces in the aisles hint at changes in the distribution of print. From there we flew...
What I Learned About Business from Going to School, Part 6
As I write this article, one Sam Fender, of North Shields in the north-east of England, is number one in the album charts in the UK. Sam went to a high school in my hometown, then joined the sixth form at my old high school. He has talked about how a teacher at his...
What I Learned About Business from Going to School, Part 5
I come from the northeast of England and went to school there until 1985. Many readers of this blog will have gone to school elsewhere, and will be much younger than I am. I’m 52 at the time of writing. I’ve developed a lot since I left school, so has institutional...
What I Learned About Business from Going to School, Part 4
There is a long list of successful businesspeople who have either dropped out of high school, college or university, or didn’t go in the first place. In the U.S. this famously includes Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and Steven Spielberg, who all dropped out...
What I Learned About Business from Going to School, Part 3
The 11 O-Levels I gained from my compulsory education were English language, English literature, maths, additional maths, physics, chemistry, Latin, history, AST, general studies and computer studies. The necessary skills and traits for business listed last time were:...
What I Learned About Business from Going to School, Part 2
When I was at school in England, the law of the time dictated that everybody had to have compulsory education to a certain age. With exceptions for home-schooling and birthdays early in the academic year, this meant, de facto, everybody had to stay at school until the...
What I Learned About Business from Going to School
What we did on our holidays
August in Japan is a reflective month. It features the O-Bon festival, when the spirits of the departed return to their former worldly homes, and the anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and is the hottest period of the year, a...
Running a School: Take some time off
We've spoken previously about being happy, and an important part of that is having a balanced life. Here at Moran Actually Towers we practice what we preach. We're taking the whole of August off from the blog. We've still got plenty of things to do, don't get me...
Shanghai Toon
I had a great trip to Shanghai. My third or fourth time there. I was originally supposed to go there from Hong Kong in 1994, then take the ferry to Osaka. I was waylaid by matters of the heart and a reservation with a 3 p.m. sunset in Whitley Bay. It was great to see...