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...
Citizens / Consumerism / Digital Democracy / Individuality / Leadership / Manifesto for Change / Politics / Trust / Wellbeing
Who Leads The State? (Part One)
The State has fallen from fashion and from grace. For many, it now encapsulates everything that is wrong in life: pointless bureaucracy; nannying interference; needless cost. The social democrats among us – too many falsely seduced by the Reagan/ Thatcher legacy – have failed to persuade, while market fundamentalists have filled the intellectual vacuum by...
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 –...
Three (more) things they don’t tell you about capitalism
Professor Ha-Joon Chang has two things in common with Karl Marx. Firstly he’s right in much of his economic analysis of the ills of capitalism and secondly his prescriptions of the solutions to these ills are lacking. Chang’s best-selling book 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism is a timely and important addition to...
Citizens / Climate change / Consumerism / Manifesto for Change / New Economics / Politics / Wellbeing
Stealing Back The Commons: Citizen Economics Beyond Capitalism (Part Two)
In part one of this blog we suggested that it might be time to question the role of capitalism in securing our futures. In this second part of the blog we look at what might replace or update capitalism 1.0. Res Communes – sustainable wellbeing economics of, by and for the citizens I’m involved currently...
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...
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...
Happy Citizens?
So the results of the first annual survey of UK wellbeing are out. As with Nef’s Happy Planet Index (HPI), the survey maps levels of our wellbeing across the UK. On the Happy Planet Index we UK citizens score very badly. So how do scores vary within the UK? Well, Blackpool – despite it’s Pleasure...
Employee Activists: Occupy Different Tents.
Whether capitalism is in crisis or in metamorphosis is a moot point. What is certain is that we cannot go on like this; that the ‘old’ normal is non-sustainable; and the ‘new normal’ will be citizen-led. This is of course a recurring theme for both the authors and followers of Citizen Renaissance: traditional hierarchies continue...
