Renaissance Realised
Nigerian activist Seun Kuti spoke recently about the need for ‘government to serve us’, rather than ‘us to serve government’. His challenge to President Goodluck Jonathan serves as a perfect aphorism for the global landscape surrounding government, as evidenced by the 2012 Edelman Trust Barometer, launched today at the World Economic Forum in Davos. More...
Europe: The Crucible of Trust
Monday 23 January sees the launch of the 2012 Edelman Trust Barometer – with its core message that trust in government has fallen dramatically worldwide, and that business now has the opportunity to shift from protecting its License to Operate to properly earning its License to Lead. There is a global sense of citizens rising...
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...
Who Do We Trust
I have spent the past twenty four hours in a luxurious retreat in the hillsides surrounding Lisbon, listening to the great and good of the global PR industry consider ‘the future’ and what it all really means. Peter Gummer/ Lord Chadlington (for they are one in the same) sparked, for me at least, a frisson...
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,...
An Informed Society and a new hope?
By the time I had returned to the office on Friday from speaking at the #Polis11 conference at LSE (curator: @CharlieBeckett), a colleague had already received an excited e-mail from a local politician asking for a transcript of my five minutes on An Informed Society? Apparently, I was ‘making waves’ – though the broad themes...
The blindness of the ‘wise’
A group of the UK’s leading economist have just written to the Chancellor saying his Plan A needs a Plan B. These wise men and women feel that the only problem with finding a return to growth is in the details of a ‘growth strategy’. Sadly these ‘wise’ people are as wrong as Osborne in...
Squaring The Circle?
I am often asked how I can ‘justify’ my (senior) position within one of the world’s largest Public Relations firms, with my impassioned views on citizenship and society. I have long held the belief not only that it is a crass falsehood to see PR as a perpetrator of evil but also that the communications...
