Happiness and Your Company
Blog post also available on the HBR Blog Network. A new vision of what it means to be prosperous and to flourish as individuals and societies is taking hold in parts of the business world. It’s inspired by the coming together of disparate disciplines including positive psychology, welfare economics, hedonomics, neuroscience, and marketing, For a...
TaxPayers’ Alliance make a mockery of themselves by denying wellbeing evidence
We’ve seen mixed reviews for the recent (ONS) announcements on options for a national wellbeing index to run alongside GDP. In support for these revolutionary new measures of progress we have an unlikely series of bedfellows, including the prime minister; progressive business leaders like Ian Cheshire and Ian Marchant CEOs of B&Q Kingfisher and SSE;...
Taking a longer view
Politics in Britain today is failing to recognise the need for a radical updating of capitalism. At the heart of this is a need for a new macroeconomics with people and planet not wealth and growth as its focus. Wellbeing economics is a fast moving and game-changing subject, it is at the vanguard of debate...
How enterprise can flourish without growth-fixation
Following on from my previous blog a number of people have asked me what a flourishing enterprise might look like in practice, how they would incorporate change into their business and get shareholder backing. In this blog I will try to answer those questions. Within the flourishing enterprise model of strategic change there are three key...
Millennium Consumption Goals
I really like the idea of Millennium Consumption Goals. Instead of fixating on what needs to happen in the developing world through the (failing) Millennium Development Goals, what about us in the rich world fessing up to our role in inequality and over-use?
Beyond the Bankers: The Advance of Citizen Capitalism
The publication of two significant works within the past fortnight signposts a welcome shift in conversation about New Economics and ‘new’ business models in the wake of the great crises of our time.
Davos’s Citizen Renaissance
A new report The Consumption Dilemma launched by the WEF last week in Davos has an interesting section talking about the shifts from ‘consumer’ to ‘citizen’ which we first discussed in Citizen Renaissance. The report quotes Citizen Renaissance co-author Robert saying “We are sensing a return to citizen, rather than consumer, values – proof positive that it is...
Big Society through the crystal ball
Great Edelman event this week all about the Big Society. Nick Hurd MP explained his view of what Big Society actually means. Peter Oborne journo'ed it out with Kevin Maguire while the other two panellists - Greenpeace's John Sauven and London 2012 Chair John Armitt CBE - both provided interesting perspectives.
The coalition’s economic blind spot
Critics of Blair’s suggest that one of his faults was his keenness for neoliberal free-market economics in which corporations and the rich got richer at the expense of people and the planet. But where is the coalition on this? Read the Orange book and you can’t help but hear Thatcher’s voice muttering agreement in the...
