A bit foreword of me?

The other day, while out walking the dog, I found myself composing a temporary foreword to my PhD in my head. I'm not sure why, except that it felt useful to try and set some boundaries for what might otherwise stray off into endless meandering.

It's amazing how words can be put together so easily and sound so well composed in the confines of one's own head, and yet how difficult it is to bring them out on paper (or screen), where they appear tangled, jumbled and inarticulate.

Although there are surely many others, once complete I see this work serving three purposes:

• Mark of ritual and formal entry to membership in a community - the agreement of two or three other human beings, at least, that it ticks enough boxes for its author to be awarded a title
• A small and real and soundly argued (even if, in docent old-age, what turns out to be a naive way), contribution to that body of work which seeks to a meta-theory and a unifying understanding of the world
• Quite specifically, a novel way (remaining true to that holistic paradigm) of helping managers understand themselves and giving them freedom to make choices where before there appeared to be none