May 2009

We’ve just had a wonderful conference at Ashridge. The theme was the global ethical leadership compass, which set me to musing on the adequacy of the metaphor. It occurred to me that the navigational compass is a very poor metaphor. Magnetic north is slowly drifting from Canada towards Siberia over disputed territories; it also wanders many miles a day; changes depending on where on the Earth you take the reading, and could swap with magnetic south at any time. A compass magnet is also affected by local magnetic fields and, to cap it all, because opposites attract magnetic north is actually the south pole anyway. Read More