- Written by Robert McCaffrey Editorial Director, Global Cement Magazine
Back in the middle of one of the lockdowns (I forget which - it’s all becoming a bit hazy now as it recedes into the past), my brother-in-law Richard Crane gifted me a copy of a book called ‘The courage to be disliked,’ by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga1. I wonder, was he sending me a message? Anyway, Richard told me that it was a challenging book. The blurb on the front cover said “How to free yourself, change your life and achieve real happiness.” Although I didn’t feel the need to do any of those things, I read the book and it was indeed both challenging and interesting. I wonder if the main points of the book could help you in your own life, both at work and at play?
- Written by Peter Edwards Editor, Global Cement Magazine
Over the past 12 years I have written many country reports for Global Cement Magazine, often googling the locations of cement plants, checking distances or otherwise snooping about. This has had an unexpected benefit that my ‘school book’ geography - country locations, outlines, capitals, populations - has become reasonably sharp.
- Written by Peter Edwards Editor, Global Cement Magazine
I was recently alerted to an interesting, if possibly controversial, online tool: Country Comparison by Hofstede Insights. It shows national cultural differences in graphical form. By doing so, it can help to uncover the drivers behind, and hence increase the understanding of, behaviours exhibited by different societies. The approach builds on the work of the Dutch social psychologist Geert Hofstede (1928 - 2020), who spent much of his career investigating the dynamics of cross-cultural organisations such as the UN. The Country Comparison tool ranks societies using six metrics: Individualism, Masculinity, Power Distance,
Uncertainty Avoidance, Indulgence and Long Term Orientation, each ranked out of 100.
- Written by Robert McCaffrey Editorial Director, Global Cement Magazine
For the first few years of this magazine, we did not have a ‘Last Word.’ We had guest columnists who wrote about their observations of the industry, really starting with Johan Riedenlow, an early contact at HW Carlsen. For several years cement industry analyst Ken Rumph wrote a number of notable columns in the magazine entitled ‘View from the City, while Jean-Marie Chandelle, CEO of CEMBUREAU , wrote a very readable and informative monthly ‘View from Brussels’ for several years until his retirement.
- Written by Robert McCaffrey Editorial Director, Global Cement Magazine
The Covid Pandemic has been awful for millions of people around the world, but as it starts to slowly recede into the rear-view mirror, we are trying to deal with a new and sometimes unrecognisable world.
