In the Summer of 2011, I was fortunate enough to work with my brother and the cast of the RSC’s production of Measure for Measure about power and politics. This is the programme note I wrote for them. Read More
In the US, Walmart famously has the Walmart Cheer to galvanise the workers. In the UK, Tesco has the 4 o’clock rumble, where staff down tools and take to the aisles, pulling forward produce from the back of the racks for the next wave of shoppers. As in poker, these cultural ‘tells’ often say more about a company’s values than can the most carefully crafted piece of webpage PR. Read More
At Ashridge we have been conducting research with leaders about what they wish they’d known 10 years ago. One finding has particular resonance with a constituency who suffer from exponentially increasing workloads and growing concern about work life balance. It is about delegation and how to choose what work to do. It is the ‘lead through/learn from’ criterion. Read More
Sharon Squires, Director of the Derby Community Safety Partnership was the 2007 winner of the Ashridge Public Leadership Centre’s essay competition, in partnership with the Guardian (read the Guardian’s excerpt from her essay here). Her essay looked at the changing relationship between citizens, politicians and public servants, using her own career history to argue that public services should not be led from London: ‘public services have become too distant from local communities; micro management has deskilled local leaders and innovation has been lost.’ Her essay resonates with a book I am currently reading about Catholic Social Teaching and the market economy. Read More
Skins, pots, beads, gold, coins, camels, land, wine, stamps … throughout history and across the world communities have had different stores of value. The innovation of coinage created liquidity for barter economies, and the innovations of credit and fractional reserve banking have accelerated this liquidity to a froth. Stiglitz and others talk about economies as being reducible to information. Perhaps it helps to regard the universal store – the universal language – as value itself, as expressed through price. This abstracts from the material into the relative and, communicated through information flows, allows a more exact matching between supply and demand. Meanwhile, people have themselves become banks, living on fractional reserves, such that their lives become a house of cards, held up by trust, a trust in the faceless millions whose total actions sustain a securitised economy. Read More
