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...
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...
“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...
Hurricane Cassandra?
There is something prophetic about Hurricane Sandy in its foretaste of what Obama is now calling a ‘warming world’. Watching New York being battered by the storm was eerily like a scene out of climate-apocalypse movie The Day After Tomorrow. That prophetic nature of Sandy was coincidental in the name given to the superstorm. Those...
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...
Cultural Intelligence – Death of the Orientalist
I am writing this blog post from Abu Dhabi, where I have been attending the 2012 Abu Dhabi Media Summit Whenever I am in the Gulf region, or indeed in Istanbul, I always feel somehow more centred – literally at the historical epicentre of global trade, the silk routes of centuries past, touched by generations...
Res Communes – the rise of citizen-led, fair-market, alternatives to capitalism
Marx was right afterall…. Its been interesting lately to hear voices from the mainstream questioning our growth-obsessed capitalist economics and calling up Karl Marx from his grave. They include Stephanie Flanders from BBC Newsnight in her recent Masters Of Money documentary on Marx, Martin Wolf in the FT with his piece last week ‘Is unlimited...
The Age of Engagement (Part Three)
Why PR firms will need to re-tool to take on the Ad guys It might yet become the agency equivalent of the Battle of Endor. A struggle is now underway for the shape and the soul of the communications firm of the future. In the third of three blog posts on the Age of Engagement,...
