I did a Google blog search on Macmillan mainly to discover whether any of our own websites are running blogs themselves. I couldn't find any (except the brilliant Nascent from Nature) but I'm sure that was my poor search strategy. There must be more.

However, the search did throw up a number of blogs from writers or commentators on Macmillan New Writing which we've discussed here from time to time. For a tiny upstart imprint MNW has certainly made waves, at least in the blogosphere and progressively elsewhere too. I don't think we've cracked the problems associated with publishing new fiction but at least we've found one channel which has the possibility of being commercially sustainable whilst retaining publishing integrity. Here are three blog links worth checking out.

http://macmillannewwriterpart2.blogspot.com/2006/12/some-things-and-quick-thing-about-old.html

http://davidthayer.booksquare.com/archives/2006/11/09/546/

http://girlondemand.blogspot.com/2006/10/in-defense-of-macmillan-and-other.html

One other link caught my eye.

This is the second book from the writing team of Clare ('not just another Bridget Jones') Naylor and Mimi ('youngest director of development for a Hollywood production company') Hare. The book will be published at the beginning of March which gives all of you time to enjoy first The Second Assistant (if you see what I mean). And now I have to declare an interest. They're both friends of mine as well as being a great writing team. We all know that word of mouth is what makes books sell. Do yourself, your friends and the authors a favour - get whispering.

Although we publish a large range of business books in Palgrave Macmillan and in Pan Macmillan I must confess to a deeply-held scepticism about the whole area of business studies and management education. In the early nineties I enjoyed a wonderful twelve weeks attending the Advanced Management Program at the Harvard Business School.

It was a privilege to be there and I made a lot of friends, had a wonderful time, and deepened my understanding of American corporate executive dynamics. I also learned what I was really bad at. Top of my incompetence list was office space planning. I'll keep the rest of the list to myself. However, I wasn't convinced that the academic basis of the curriculum was really as rigorous as it might have been and I came away believing that common sense was probably the best way to run a business profitably.

It was therefore with some surprise that I came across the Stanford Business School's Bob Sutton and his 'Ten Things I Believe'. I think I believe them too.

1.    Sometimes the best management is no management at all -- first do no harm!

2.   Indifference is as important as passion.

3.    In organizational life, you can have influence over others or you can have freedom from others, but you can't have both at the same time.

4.    Learning how to say smart things and give smart answers is important. Learning to listen to     others and to ask smart questions is more important.

5.    You get what you expect from people. This is especially true when it comes to selfish behavior;   self-interest is a learned social norm, not an inherent feature of human behavior.

6.    Getting a little power can turn you into an insensitive self-centered jerk.

7.    Avoid pompous jerks whenever possible. They not only can make you feel bad about yourself, chances are that you will eventually start acting like them.

8.    The best test of a person's character is how he or she treats those with less power.

9.    Err on the side of optimism and positive energy in all things.

10. Work is an over-rated activity.

Along with the last of the Christmas cards there arrived the Trinity College Cambridge Annual Record. It is a beautifully restrained piece of production, printed at Cambridge University Press with an elegant one-colour paper cover, 136 pages well-edited text and a handful of beautiful illustrations of the college, some of which are in colour. Trinity is indeed beautiful and these photos don't do it justice.

The last pieces in The Record are an obituary from the The Times  and an address by the Bishop of London, Richard Chartres, about Harry Williams. I had missed notice of his death until I saw these.

I met Williams when, as a 16-year-old, I was invited to an interview to see whether I would be an appropriate member of Trinity assuming my exam results were satisfactory. I was studying biology, physics and chemistry and was applying to read medicine. It was therefore slightly surprising to be interviewed by someone who showed absolutely no interest in my clever rehearsed pieces about natural selection and cell differentiation. This genial old monk very courteously invited me into his rooms on Great Court.

He offered me my very first gin and tonic. If I'd thought of it I might have been expecting  a sherry but G and T it was. We discussed rugby and the harshness of schools and the absurdity of exams. Then he offered me another G and T and more chitchat. We shook hands and two weeks later I had a letter telling me that I had a place provided I passed the exams reasonably well. When I started my rather undistinguished Cambridge career he was my 'moral tutor'. His broadminded liberalism was a huge relief to me.

I'm sure the interview wouldn't pass muster today where they have to be more 'rigorous', take into account 'balance' of admissions ensuring not too many middle-class people enter the college. I imagine, however, that what I enjoyed was what had been practised successfully quite some time as this list suggests.

The obituaries told me more about Harry Williams than I had known. I certainly didn't realise the impact he had on theology. I do, however, know that the interview with him and its result had enormous impact on my life and I am grateful to him for that.

The death of Saparmurat Niyazov has triggered much about his absurd megalomaniac presidential decrees. It is a reminder of the personality disorders which can afflict those with power. It's pretty easy to laugh off the foibles of a central Asian dictator but power corrupts and the closer the power is to being absolute so is the degree of corruption.

Fortunately in business, reality is forced on even the most megalomaniacal by the market place. We can't force people to buy Wayne Rooney's memoirs, nor prevent them from buying Why don't penguins feet freeze?. Things become a little more difficult though in the public sector.

The democratic process in London elected a guy called Ken Livingstone as Mayor. There can be no arguing with the process but I'm beginning to have concerns about the degree to which he is being corrupted by power. He has appointed a Cartoonist Laureate. He appointed a 'Cabinet' although I can't find any reference to their meeting since 2002 (perhaps they disagreed with him). He built a new palace for him and his team on the Thames.

Apparently it's already too small to house his staff and his ambitions and they are looking for a new opportunity to build a larger palace at Londoners' expense.

But what really triggered this outburst was the receipt through my letterbox of The Londoner which describes itself as a newsletter for Londoners. It is actually a propaganda document for the glorification of the Mayor and all his deeds reminiscent of Pravda in the good old days of Soviet imperialism.

After three months of email badgering (see below and read from the bottom up) I have now established that we taxpayers are contributing at least £3 million pounds a year to support the political ambitions of our Mayor. Harrumph. I'm waiting for him to change officially the names of South Ken, High Street Ken, Ken Salrise, The Ken Nington Oval, and Ken Tishtown.

Incidentally is a service level of 20 days to respond to an email adequate in the 21st century?

From: Mayor [mailto:mayor@london.gov.uk]

From: Mayor [mailto:mayor@london.gov.uk]

From: Mayor [mailto:mayor@london.gov.uk]

As The Londoner is a publication giving information about all the services in the GLA Group it is jointly funded by the Greater London Authority, Transport for London, The Metropolitan Police Service and the London Development Agency. Information about the budget for each of these bodies is available on the GLA's website. Please visit the link: http://www.london.gov.uk/gla/budget/current_budget.jsp for the Annual Budget 2006/07 and the information on the council tax precept.

Your email is currently with The Londoner team and is receiving attention. We aim to answer emails within twenty working days from the day following receipt. I have attached a link to our service standards http://www.london.gov.uk/gla/plu_service_stds.jsp

There is a newish tradition at this time of year of CEOs emailing all staff reviewing the year just closing. Peter Olson at Random House is probably the star performer. Jack Romanos ('utterly charming, handsome and delightful') at Simon and Schuster has issued something similar and also Gail Rebuck. I'm never quite sure whether these letters are meant just for staff or for general consumption. Extracts always seem to make their way into the trade press anyway and so I suppose they are not confidential. The theme is usually the same (and I can be equally guilty). I offer this, copyright free, to all CEOs for use in any circumstances.

It's been a great year for us in spite of a number of market difficulties. Underlying sales and profits are at record highs (allowing for exchange differences, changes in GAAP, varying retail distribution criteria, enhanced accounting practices for advances and stock, intercompany tax movements,etc). Our competitors are struggling with the market conditions but we've managed to find solutions while maintaining our commitment to the highest standards of integrity and caring. All our authors are truly wonderful both creatively and as human beings. Incidentally, we also support environmental action, the developing world, inclusiveness, positive discrimination (where legally required) and fair treatment for all our stakeholders. India and China are really important places with many people and we are investing since our successful presidential visit. Next year will be even tougher but, thanks to the foresight of the senior management team, we'll probably survive. Thank you all from the bottom of my heart and have a wonderful holiday season with your friends and family. I loook forward to working with you to achieve our 2007 goals together when I return from (enter holiday destination) towards the end of January.

I decided not to put out such a letter this year. Instead here are a few milestones with round numbers. I'd be grateful if anyone from Macmillan would let me know of other statistics which should be included here to make the list more comprehensive.

Macmillan India processed over 1 million pages of text for publishers worldwide. We now employ more than 3,000 people.

Nature Publishing Group had 40,000 papers submitted - they accepted 3000. Nature itself rejected 11,000 of the 12,000 papers it received. The electronic version is now available on 10 million desktops and we've recorded 1.5 million podcast downloads.

Gill and Macmillan managed a 10% profit on general books in a market less than half the size of London.

College Press in Zimbabwe sold 500,000 books in spite of the dreadful conditions in that country.

Our co-venture with the leading Chinese educational publishers FLTRP sold 50 million copies of New Standard English in the year, taking the total to 150 million.

Macmillan Spain supplied 600,000 users with their new Bugs course.

More statistics to come in due course.

Whilst there is no diminution in the debate about public library maladministration in the UK it is always encouraging to see some parts of the library business addressing the challenges of the future with determination and optimism. Against the Grain is a journal which 'links publishers, vendors and librarians' and consistently adds transparency and understanding to what can be fraught relationships. Just check out their latest contents list for a flavour. They also organise the successful Charleston Conferences and run a newsletter which has just landed on my desk, The Charleston Report. A regular feature is a column called By the Numbers and I hope they don't mind my lifting a few statistics from it:

50% of web visitors don't scroll down to view the portion of a web page which is not visible on their monitor screen.

45% of people use Google for search, 28% Yahoo, 12% MSN and 6% ask.com. (What I find strange is that Google is not higher).

1.5 million people have joined the online social network Second Life already.

136 million people have registered with Skype.

And after all these wonderful numbers I was shocked to find a truly depressing number. One of our books which was identified as in the top ten best books of the year by the New York Times has managed to sell fewer than 1500 copies in the UK - an indication of the problems of publishing high-quality non-fiction successfully in a UK high street market dominated by celebrity biographies. Perhaps the fog-induced chaos at Heathrow Airport may stimulate book sales.

But publishers must remain optimistic and today is the birthday of the 32nd Nature branded journal, Nature Photonics. Its editorial team is spread between Tokyo, San Francisco and London and already it is attracting the very best research papers in what is one of the fastest-growing fields of scientific endeavour. Fingers, toes and optical fibres are all crossed.

Walking to work this morning listening to BBC Radio 4 I tuned in to two pieces about Nature. They were triggered by the journal publishing the results of an experiment we undertook where we invited scientists to submit their papers for public (as opposed to the more traditional system of confidential reviewing) peer review. You can hear the debate at 7.25am here between the editor of Nature and the editor of an online scientific journal from the charity-supported Public Library of Science. There was also an earlier journalistic piece at around 640am. I've also pasted in below an article from the Wall Street Journal on the same subject.

It's great that a subject so apparently arcane as scientific peer review should be considered important enough to warrant two slots on the most important radio programme in the UK and a feature in the world's leading financial newspaper. What is not so great is that the discussions manage to confuse open reviewing with free access, comment with criticism, freedom of information with free information, an excellent system which catches nearly all attempted scientific fraud with a flawed system which allows fraud to happen, the desire to speak confidentially and openly as opposed to the apparently open but necessarily guarded alternative. In other words and as usual, a tricky and important debate has been reduced to a few soundbites of little value and significant distortion.

On a more immediately important subject, the disgraceful death sentence imposed on the health workers in Libya. Declan Butler has written a professional state of play piece. Do read it and do, if you can, support the resistance to this terrible injustice.

Visitors to this blog may have noticed an omission in the last few days - no progress report on England's attempt to retain the Ashes, the every 18-month cricket battle between Australia and England. A little while ago I suggested that I'd be very happy if England was boringly 3-0 up in the series at this stage and I could claim my winnings (I bet A$500 at 2-1). I was nearly correct. The score is 3-0 but the wrong way round and I have had to concede the bet and any pride in the 2005 victory in England.

The defeat has been crushing but the strange thing is that, apart from the first match where England were completely dire throughout, the other two could have (or even should) have been won at various times. Apart from the obvious talent and professionalism of many of the Australian players I can't help thinking that a significant difference was about leadership. Somehow, England just didn't have it. This is the England manager after the defeat - his face says it all.

For more detail on all this disappointment go to the Ashes on cricinfo. In spite of this gloom - or maybe as an antidote - some cricket books are doing really well in Britain. My favourite, Wisden Anthology,was made Book of the Week in the Sunday Times and garnered this great review in the Guardian. I quote from the beginning of the ST review:

'If Wisden is cricket's Bible, here is the New Testament.'

The book, all 1300 pages and £40 worth, has reprinted and, hallelujah, a major bookshop chain has finally agreed to purchase some copies for sale at Christmas - better late than never. Perhaps they should have read my previous blog and taken note.

Finally on cricket someone sent me this rather unkind joke about England's cricketers.

Billy was at school this morning and the teacher asked all the children what their fathers did for a living. All the typical answers came out, fireman, policeman, salesman, chippy, captain of industry etc, but Billy was being uncharacteristically quiet and so the teacher asked him about his father.

"My father is an exotic dancer in a gay club and takes off all his clothes in front of other men. Sometimes if the offer is really good, he'll go out with a man, rent a cheap hotel room and let them sleep with him."

The teacher quickly set the other children some work and took little Billy aside to ask him if that was really true.

"No" said Billy, "He plays cricket for England but I was just too embarrassed to say."