Why do I write this Blog? Nicole Stuart explains

I have two main roles in my life. I am a Management Consultant, working internationally to help companies and governments improve the way they do things. Generally, this work results in the client company earning more profit by reducing the wasted costs inherent in many activities, but often the real need is to interact with the world in a more effective and efficient way. Both companies and governments have a set of customers who want good service. This ranges from the sole doctor with a group of ten patients waiting in his waiting room to be seen, through the multinational automaker faced by a massive recall of defective vehicles, to a government body that requires ten months to issue a set of documents to which the public are entitled and which are essential, under law, to perform many of the normal functions of life. My philosophy in my work has always been to attempt to make things better for all involved, for the client, for the ‘customers’ and for the workers who might be displaced as a result of my recommendations. In this regard, I have been remarkably successful, with most displaced workers being offered new opportunities for employment, within their old employers or in new ventures created by my organization. The number of these new jobs presently stands in the tens of thousands, all of them sustainable because we have experts working with the owners constantly to refine their activities.

The second part of my work life is devoted to writing fiction. I have written over fifty books, all of them still selling well in most of the major markets around the world. I have always read widely, since my earliest years. Reading has given me a very large input of thoughts, ideas and ways of looking at the world. Reading has enabled me to visit other people, other places and other times, and to gain some understanding of what I am witnessing. That has worked very well in my consultancy activities, in which I am able to view the ways that numerous people in different places do the same sort of work, to understand that each way is relevant to those particular people, and to evaluate what is best and what less effective in achieving the objective. The consultancy activity has exposed me to many people and the ways they think, their personal viewpoints and experiences. I have found that everyone has something interesting to tell, some fascinating insight into the everyday and the unusual. This exposure has given me a vast pool of thoughts and ideas for my novels, a pool that is constantly bubbling over. Unfortunately, my exposure to other aspects of our world has made me uncomfortable with what we accept, which we do simply because it is so. I believe that we each have an obligation to understand our environment, not to accept what happens around us simply because it is so. We were given brains with amazing capabilities, and it is a denial of our Humanity not to use those capabilities.

Some of the more unsavory parts of the world that I have come to understand relate to politics and to justice. It is no coincidence that many politicians come from the fields of law and religion. Politicians, particularly the less scrupulous of them, are willing to use both law and religion to achieve their own selfish ends, in the knowledge that both fields of learning are substantially closed to the layman. Law is a complex field of study, and it has been manipulated by lawyers to ensure that the less knowledgeable among us are more or less forced to accept what is foisted on us ‘because we say so.’ Although the legal presumption is that every person in a society is presumed to know every law and regulation to which he or she is subject and to abide by them completely, that presumption is clearly a fiction. The number of laws passed each year in most countries is so great that it is impossible for even an expert lawyer to know the detail, so that the average Joe is forced to rely on common sense, an extremely unreliable form of understanding, or on rumor and bullet-point explanations of what the law says. That situation is exacerbated by the fact that each law often delegates the duty of making detailed regulations for the implementation and operation of the laws. Neither common sense nor rumor can protect the layman from transgressing some law or other, probably many times each year. The fact that we generally do not go broke paying the fines or spend years in prison is more luck than good sense.

The other aspect of concern relates to the use of religion by politicians, working on the innate respect each of us has for the pronouncements of men of the cloth. In this way, the President of South Africa declared before an election that his Party would stay in power until the second coming of Christ, yet no-one stood up to denounce this abuse of religion. The same President also informed the voters that, if they did not vote for his Party, they would be punished by their ancestors! Virtually every leader of a nation going to war claims that their cause has the backing of the Almighty, but who stands up to question that? Virtually every dictator claims to have the backing of the spirits for his cause, and almost every senior public representative swears an Oath of Office in the name of God, before proceeding to violate that oath at every turn. Has anyone ever been called to account for taking the name of the Deity in vain?

In all of my books, I attempt to describe some of the things I have learned in an entertaining and, hopefully, informative fashion. Although I want my books to be enjoyed by my readers, I would like them to sit back after reading and digest what they have read. I want their lives to be enriched by my books beyond mere entertainment. I want them to have some new thought or idea, some different set of experiences or exposure, to meditate on in the days and weeks to come.

In my blog, the purpose is more immediate and relevant to a particular situation. I live in South Africa, Germany, Britain and the United States, depending on where my most time-consuming projects are, and I work internationally, with fifteen countries hosting at least one major project. I love each of the countries and the people in them. If you open yourself to people, it is impossible not to like them. However, that does not blind me to the shortcomings I see in them. No single country is perfect, although several come as close to that state as may be possible in an imperfect world. In most cases, the politicians work hard at increasing the imperfections, usually against the real wishes of the citizens. The worst in this regard are the African countries, where the tradition of real democracy is not yet sufficiently deeply embedded for it to become an overriding consideration in the minds of the citizens, most of whom have some tribal tradition in the backs of their minds. Tribal rule is as far removed from true democracy as communism, and it is no surprise that Marxist governments tend to promote tribal contrasts as a means of entrenching their own ideas of a ‘democratic dictatorship’. Although few African countries do not escape this categorization, the one that comes first to mind is South Africa. It is a country that started, under difficult conditions, to establish a democracy, faltering at first under the racist thinking of Apartheid and then again under the dominant Marxist-Leninist policies of the present Neo-Apartheid government of the ANC. In both cases, the idea was to use the differences of the one group against the others as a lever to divide and conquer. I suppose that, initially, the purpose was to obtain and maintain political power, but, in both cases, that quickly degenerated to become an outright kleptocracy, in which political power was used for self-enrichment of those few in control. In both cases it was misguided at best, and almost certainly criminal, yet the rest of the world allowed the situation to develop to the point where the country was reduced to a shadow of what it could have been. The people of the world also pay the price for this, because your success indirectly is my success. The whole population of the world is enriched if at least one part of it succeeds.

And that is part of the message of many of my blog articles. If we work together to overcome criminality, prejudice and partisanship, we can make the world a better place, a much better place for all of us.

I hope that my books and my blog will play a part in that. I hope that, by giving you a view of the facts and of an alternative way of understanding them, I can encourage each of you to take a step in the direction of a better world for all of us.

I would love to hear from you. If you send an email to me at NicoleAStuart@gmail.com, I will send you a list of my books with a brief description of each, and notify you of new books and blog articles as they are published. I will never use your email address for any other purpose.