Yesterday saw our twice a year board meeting. We reviewed last year's results, first quarter 2006 performance and our projections for the rest of the year. Or that's what we pretended to do. Actually it was an opportunity to collect our thoughts and focus on what really matters - where do we want to take the business, where are the opportunities for growth, where are the pratfalls, where the genuine strategic threats, are we investing enough in people, publishing, are we taking enough risks? It reminded me of the enormous breadth of the world of Macmillan - children's publishing, learned journals, software development, science, Picador, Papua New Guinea, Sao Paulo, Greece, On-line learning, site licences for academic content, books on memory sticks, online communities, mass-market paperbacks, growth in Russia, support for African education, sourcing slates from China, new authors versus existing blockbusters, building blogs for authors, developing sales analysis tools, serving US college publishers with text processing, selling New Zealand-developed literacy schemes to the USA and so on. All this is what makes publishing so exciting, interesting and fulfilling.

And meanwhile the Google debate continues and we have a new concept, the literati/technorati divide which you can read about at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/21/AR2006052101349_pf.html.

Incidentally a googly (from which the great organisation may have derived its name - OED please check) is a delivery by a right arm spin bowler which to a right hand batsman appears as if it will spin from leg to off, however, spins in the opposite direction. This may well be the problem with Google too.