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...
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...
Today’s flourishing enterprises should focus on wellbeing rather than growth
When I run sessions with business executives on growth, wellbeing, and innovation, I say that people don’t have to buy my analysis of the problem to buy my ideas on the solution. That’s because I think we are now living in an era of “uneconomic growth” and we therefore have no choice but to redefine...
Have the wheels come off the green movement?
How ironic that the poster-child of the low-carbon tech-future – the Toyota Prius – is being recalled en-masse. This seems like just one more blow for the green movement after Glacier-gate and the UEA email fiasco. Now we are told that numerous polls are showing a reverse in confidence around climate change science. This is...
Copenhagen – a gathering of the peasants of the earth
So we didn’t get a deal. Yes, this is a catastrophic failure of the thousands of negotiators, media, world leaders and informed experts who crammed into the Bella Centre for two weeks in December. But this is a failure too for civil society, and not only those who travelled to Copenhagen formally (as NGO representatives,...
Blowing hot and cold
It’s been a bad week for Ed Milliband’s renewables aspirations. The RSPB and Scottish Natural Heritage have come out all nimby against the planned Shetland wind farm. And the Vestas jobs protest in the Isle of Wight is being joined by disappointed festival goers from the canceled Big Green Gathering. BP is again defending their...
Politics is dead – long live citizen-power
At last some honesty from a politician. David Milliband has delivered a Mea Culpa and come clean saying that transport has not “fundamentally changed”, a shift in power from Whitehall to local government “has not yet happened” and, on the environment, “our low carbon revolution is still to come”. He also admitted that “the traditional...
Phoenix enterprises
A great new report and work program from John Elkington’s new outfit Volans. The concept is that the future we talk about in Chapter Four is most promising for new Phoenix Enterprises which will emerge from the flames of the Perfect Storm’s crucible. As we say in the book, many of the current incumbents of...
Towards The Reformation
A rather gentle piece on Transition Towns in this weekend’s FT showed no trace of irony, given the seismic shocks that continue to shake our world. It was almost as if ‘nice to do’ and ‘need to do’ can never be real bedfellows. Yet never has that need been more urgent. An apparent eagerness to...
