Citizens / Communications / Consumerism / Digital Democracy / Leadership / Manifesto for Change / Trust
Five Ways Business Leaders Can Embrace The Citizen State Within
Citizen-centric leadership in business asks that leaders embrace the citizen state within. This means co-creating ideas, strategies and programmes with networks of real people, increasingly active and vocal, and shaping the organisation around their needs and aspirations, to help better define common purpose. This may sound revolutionary, but it is an axiomatic consequence of the...
Three Lessons from PR’s Failure to Win on CSR, Social & Content
The footballing cliché runs that teams must score when they are dominating the game. PR consultancies often manage early possession, but then struggle to find the back of the net. It happened with CSR and with social and now with content, too – a failure to convert early-mover advantage into sustained leadership. We let others...
Content, Communications & The Art of Absence
John Cage’s 1952 recording of four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence was the musical expression of Duchamp’s belief in the role of spectator as well as artist; in the subversion of the conventional. You can watch a version of it here. David Bowie is another artist who properly understands the power of absence –...
Polising the State of Media
Neil Wallis (formerly of the News of the World and, briefly, the Metropolitan Police) accidentally said that “what we see in the media, we see in all the other institutions of society”. Speaking at #PolisTrust at the London School of Economics, Wallis was referring to the issue of trust. He is of course correct –...
Bright Ideas: On Creative Spaces, the Citizen State & Sex as Science Fact
Three short, ‘Bright Ideas’, as featured in today’s eI Individual Digest. These are thoughts collected amid the peaceful beauty of Aldeburgh, Thorpeness and Snape – home to Names Not Numbers 2013, a symposium created by @juliahobsbawm and dedicated to discusing the role of individuality in a mass age. Also billed as “like Davos, but with...
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 / 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...
Shared Society: The State We’re In
I headed to Rio de Janeiro last week for the Global Economic Symposium, with the opening paragraphs of a new book in my head. The (2013) follow-on from Citizen Renaissance is set to examine the rise of City States in the Twenty First Century, just as their namesakes had originally blossomed in the Fifteenth. With...
