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...
Polising the State of Media
Neil Wallis (formerly of the News of the World and, briefly, the Metropolitan Police) accidentally said that “what we see in the media, we see in all the other institutions of society”. Speaking at #PolisTrust at the London School of Economics, Wallis was referring to the issue of trust. He is of course correct –...
Citizens / Digital Democracy / Individuality / Leadership / Manifesto for Change / New Economics / Politics / Trust / Wellbeing
The Indecency of Power
Plato famously believed that philosophers should rule. Aristotle argued that the political class must be led by ‘men of virtue’. They both had a point. “Much of what is amiss in our world”, as Judt commented, “can best be captured in the language of classical political thought”. In today’s city states, nation states and business...
Ill Fares The Land: The Book I Wish I Had Written
Possibly one of the finest treatises on politics, Tony Judt’s ‘Ill Fares The Land’ is the one book I wish that I had written. Polemical and passionate in equal measure – and despite Judt’s untimely death – this is in many ways the book for our times: the perfect re-artuclation of social democracy and the...
Nick Clegg’s Failure is the Failure to Ask The Right Questions
Nick Clegg’s current predicament is a perfect example of a leader failing to ask the right questions. Furthermore, as Professor Stefan Stern has pointed out, Clegg has been swept into the classic CEO pitfall of choosing not to pursue issues that sit in the “too hard” basket. Both epitomise serious shortcomings of leadership. The fact...
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...
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...
