BPP Blog

Some special pleading here. I chair our university’s publishing company. I worry as much as any manufacturer about the cost of print (a ‘non-strategic cost’), which includes holding stock, returns policies, stock write-offs, the ecological impact of paper, carbon footprints (or whatever we print people photocopy when they sit on the copier), recycling, forest stewardship, fire, glue, chiropractic or osteopathic bills (as students carry weighty more

Twenty years ago, it was common sense amongst the forecasting/pundit community (speculative thinkers not willing to go the whole hog and write science fiction) was that Japan would rise to economic dominance, continuing exponentially  its remarkable growth. Now it is China, reasserting its historic weight in the world: Confucius institutes are opening worldwide, to project more

A few years ago Thomas Friedman’s “The World is Flat” took the world by storm: it described the minutiae of globally distributed supply chains; parts of laptops being designed in some countries, shipped to others, assembled elsewhere.   It has become the common sense in political thinking that globalisation is (a) here already, with deep economic more

Those who have encountered, in whatever medium, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy will know that the answer to ‘life, the universe and everything’ is exactly 42. However, it looks like this answer needs to be qualified and, as far as some human organisations are concerned, the number is, in fact, around 150. It seems more