Is George Osborne questioning capitalism?
This post originally featured on www.leftfootforward.org There seems to be consensus on these pages that last month’s budget was both socially and ecologically regressive. However, in calling aggressive tax avoidance “morally repugnant” in the budget, is George Osborne joining other Tories who have lately voiced concerns about capitalism and indeed is he, perhaps inadvertently, suggesting...
How might ‘Davos-man’ regain trust?
Professor Klaus Schwab, Executive Chair of WEF wrote recently about this year’s Davos theme of ‘Shaping new models for structural transformation of the global economy’. We could certainly do with some new models. So what can we learn about these new models from this year’s Edelman Trust Barometer which Richard Edelman will be presenting in...
Reclaiming Brundtland in 2012
Have we lost our way in only focusing on the ‘means’ and not the ‘ends’ of a true definition of Sustainable Development? As we enter 2012 and the run-up to Rio+20, what can we learn from looking back to 1987? Sustainable Development’s blueprint – needs and means. As we emerge from our collective failures of...
Consumption for what?
Blog post also available on The Guardian Sustainable Business Blog. A recent series of blogs on this site discussed the idea that the UK might finally be starting to decouple growth from environmental destruction. Whilst this looks unlikely, my concern is that the debate is in any case missing half the story. By focusing on...
Happiness and Your Company
Blog post also available on the HBR Blog Network. A new vision of what it means to be prosperous and to flourish as individuals and societies is taking hold in parts of the business world. It’s inspired by the coming together of disparate disciplines including positive psychology, welfare economics, hedonomics, neuroscience, and marketing, For a...
From cargo-cult to slowcialism
There was an interesting follow up last week to the UN’s research showing that UK children have the lowest levels of wellbeing in the EU. The update suggests that these low levels of wellbeing are due to unusually high materialism levels. As one of the recommendations from UNICEF was a ban on advertising to children,...
TaxPayers’ Alliance make a mockery of themselves by denying wellbeing evidence
We’ve seen mixed reviews for the recent (ONS) announcements on options for a national wellbeing index to run alongside GDP. In support for these revolutionary new measures of progress we have an unlikely series of bedfellows, including the prime minister; progressive business leaders like Ian Cheshire and Ian Marchant CEOs of B&Q Kingfisher and SSE;...
Taking a longer view
Politics in Britain today is failing to recognise the need for a radical updating of capitalism. At the heart of this is a need for a new macroeconomics with people and planet not wealth and growth as its focus. Wellbeing economics is a fast moving and game-changing subject, it is at the vanguard of debate...
How enterprise can flourish without growth-fixation
Following on from my previous blog a number of people have asked me what a flourishing enterprise might look like in practice, how they would incorporate change into their business and get shareholder backing. In this blog I will try to answer those questions. Within the flourishing enterprise model of strategic change there are three key...
