The future of business: what are the alternatives to capitalism?
In this Guardian article Jules asks what the implications of limits to growth are for capitalist theory, the alternatives, and what it means for business Evidence shows its very clear we have reached the safe limits to growth in terms of the most pressing threat to human civilisation – that of a stable atmosphere. Therefore,...
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...
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...
Bright Ideas: On Creative Spaces, the Citizen State & Sex as Science Fact
Three short, ‘Bright Ideas’, as featured in today’s eI Individual Digest. These are thoughts collected amid the peaceful beauty of Aldeburgh, Thorpeness and Snape – home to Names Not Numbers 2013, a symposium created by @juliahobsbawm and dedicated to discusing the role of individuality in a mass age. Also billed as “like Davos, but with...
Three (more) things they don’t tell you about capitalism
Professor Ha-Joon Chang has two things in common with Karl Marx. Firstly he’s right in much of his economic analysis of the ills of capitalism and secondly his prescriptions of the solutions to these ills are lacking. Chang’s best-selling book 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism is a timely and important addition to...
Citizens / Climate change / Consumerism / Manifesto for Change / New Economics / Politics / Wellbeing
Stealing Back The Commons: Citizen Economics Beyond Capitalism (Part Two)
In part one of this blog we suggested that it might be time to question the role of capitalism in securing our futures. In this second part of the blog we look at what might replace or update capitalism 1.0. Res Communes – sustainable wellbeing economics of, by and for the citizens I’m involved currently...
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...
Happy Citizens?
So the results of the first annual survey of UK wellbeing are out. As with Nef’s Happy Planet Index (HPI), the survey maps levels of our wellbeing across the UK. On the Happy Planet Index we UK citizens score very badly. So how do scores vary within the UK? Well, Blackpool – despite it’s Pleasure...
Citizens / Climate change / Energy / Leadership / Manifesto for Change / New Economics / Politics / Sustainability / Trust / Wellbeing
The Future Who Wants (or needs)?
As the dusts settles on Rio+20 what are we to make of it? What key elements of the Sustainable Development debate might have been missing and what signs of hope are there outside the official treaty-making world? A failure of epic proportions? Commentators are fairly unanimous that the Rio+20 talks have been a failure. Expectations...
