Citizens / Climate change / Consumerism / Energy / Leadership / Manifesto for Change / New Economics / Politics / Sustainability
Stealing Back The Commons: Citizen Economics Beyond Capitalism (Part One)
Michael Jacobs, an ex-SpAd to Gordon Brown, has recently written in the New Satesman that ‘green social democracy can save capitalism’. Well, not everyone agrees. For some, the ‘green social democracy’ experiment has, thus far, not worked, and indeed, might be running out of time. And as for capitalism – or at least capitalism1.0, it’s...
Nick Clegg’s Failure is the Failure to Ask The Right Questions
Nick Clegg’s current predicament is a perfect example of a leader failing to ask the right questions. Furthermore, as Professor Stefan Stern has pointed out, Clegg has been swept into the classic CEO pitfall of choosing not to pursue issues that sit in the “too hard” basket. Both epitomise serious shortcomings of leadership. The fact...
Citizens / Consumerism / Digital Democracy / Individuality / Leadership / Manifesto for Change / New Economics / Politics / Trust
World Gone Wrong
“The idea is essentially repulsive, of a society held together only by the relations and feelings arising out of pecuniary interest” John Stuart Mill As though scripted for a 1970s dystopian SciFi fantasy, society has landed in the wrong place and is apparently marooned here. Our people and our planet are not at ease with...
Citizens / Climate change / Digital Democracy / Leadership / Manifesto for Change / Politics / Trust
Stop Swaying. Start Shifting
It is time to re-consider some societal fundamentals and have an honest conversation about the legitimacy of power. Why are we surprised that the Eurozone remains in crisis? That the issue of ‘Palestine’ remains unresolved? That American kids are still being shot in the streets, only weeks after the horrors of Newtown? That austerity lingers...
Citizens / Climate change / Digital Democracy / Leadership / Manifesto for Change / Politics / Trust
Changing the World: Refuse the License to Pretend
Re-reading James Breiding in the Wall Street Journal on ‘The Unbearable Vanity of Davos’, I was reminded of a first encounter with the cartoonist Hugh MacLeod: ‘Change the world or go home’ was his ‘Blue Monster’ message to Microsoft in 2006. ‘Microsoft’, MacLeod later confided to authors David Brain and Martin Thomas, ‘is in the...
Fit to Trust?
Dear Leader…… I regret to inform you that you have just failed the Trust test. There has been a flurry of noise around trust in recent days, perhaps stirred by the impending launch, from my alma mater, of the 2013 Edelman Trust Barometer ahead of this year’s gathering of the great and good in Davos....
Citizens / Climate change / Communications / Digital Democracy / Leadership / Manifesto for Change / Trust / Wellbeing
The Leadership of Trust
Trust trips off the tongues of most political and business leaders with worrying ease. It is a word always easy to say but a relationship more difficult to earn. And trust simply spoken is trust rarely earned. A seminal HBR blog post yesterday by John Kotter (http://tinyurl.com/aggogfz) drew the important distinction between management and leadership...
The Four Heels of Achilles (and how to avoid the Dinosaur Trap)
Despite my long-held belief in the transformative power of communications for collective and societal good, these are worrying times for the profession of PR. While the evolved form of Public Relations, Public Engagement, remains central to the restoration of trust and the advancement of the true sustainability agenda, there is a real danger that this...
“What did you do when the earth was unraveling”?
I lay awake last night with my six-month-old daughter sleeping in my arms and I cried. I cried for her future, for what she won’t have, what she won’t see. I grieved for a loss she is not yet aware of, for the theft of a life she deserved, stolen by my generation as we...
