Something for the weekend

So now I am off to the UK, family business, and this is what I have packed for my weekend reading:

- “Continuity in Russian regions: How ‘Operation Successor’ is working in key regions and what it means for international investors - Tatarstan” – and note I have finally learned how properly to spell Tatarstan in the Roman alphabet!
- “Distributed Influence – Quantifying the impact of social media” - an Edelman white paper
- “A power audit of EU-Russia relations” – a policy piece from the European Council on Foreign Relations, one of its co-authors is Mark Leonard. He and I once got cautiously drunk, as I recall, at a Labour Party annual Conference - 1996 or 1997; in Blackpool or Brighton (they all merge into one hideous memory)
- “Social costs of smoking and the impact of tobacco excise duties”; an academic study from Hungary (!) – it comes with a handy second volume of Excel spreadsheet data
- “Value at the bottom of the pyramid” (a refutation of ‘common misconceptions about doing business with low-income consumers’) - from the IE Business School in Madrid.

And I wonder why there is so little joy in my life… LOL!