Author: Dr Stephen Gibbs
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Long-term value: Improving your board’s strategy processes in 2019
UK senior leaders with a genuine concern for long-term sustainable value will not be surprised to find boardroom discussion being dominated by strategy considerations in the next few weeks. Not just because access to European markets is uncertain but because globalisation offers interesting opportunities. Boardrooms are often referent to their organisation’s concept of ‘the strategic’.…
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The changing nature of organisational purpose under globalisation
I thought it worthwhile capturing the sensations leaders and managers are experiencing when considering purpose and direction. And express this outside of our normal functional language-set, drawing from the late and I believe great Zygmunt Bauman, the Leeds-based sociologist. Does this seem plausible to say that the modern purposeful nature of global management in late-modernity…
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A message to Chairpersons/CEOs from history: the UK’s new global role post-BREXIT
Micro-analysis on the BREXIT deal is obscuring the long-view of the UK’s eventual place in the new world-order. This podcast invites a very confident view from history. Past withdrawals from European power invited interesting equilibrium-seeking leadership. Via media, or the middle-way, became something of the English genius. The ability to please our European markets and hunt down…
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The CEO and their language as leaders: developing new ways of speaking realistically into a changing world
Leadership in contemporary organisations is dominated by the language of function. Largely as organisations have evolved to privilege the functional behaviours of its members. Unsurprising given the globalising of modern society. And modern societies often prefer speech rooted in events and people over and above the apparent abstractness of ideas or imagining. That we are…
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Authenticity and change in the coming commercial flux (Podcast)
Authenticity remains an appealing notion in that it suggests the presence of the good and true. It implies a centredness around a core self image. Leadership has tended at times to offer these characteristics as attractive to followers. Alignment to an authentic figure is reassuring in a modern non-traditional landscape. But for modern people, those…
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Naked Education: odd and ordinary learning
There is the argument that ordinary people enjoy life. They enjoy ordinary things. But odd people find ordinary life painful. How much ordinariness is being inflicted by education and business on contemporary life is an important concern. To Know seems rooted in oddness. Especially Socratic knowledge. And does ordinariness in learning affect ‘good knowledge’? Especially…
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The Mad Shareholder: struggle of speaking into contemporary society
How much does ‘speaking into’ the world as a ‘stakeholder’ effect change? The image of us as stakeholders with a voice is often undifferentiated. This podcast discusses this and other issues. Including the relationship between myth and reality, and the problems of privileging unquestioned rationalism.
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Grenfell and the banality of modern power: and how very ordinary people diligently partake in evil
The Grenfell tragedy reveals another possible horror and that is the absence of individual actors to bear, in a very modern moral sense, the culpability that our notions of ‘leadership’ require. We place great store on leaders as agents who have power to change our world, but when failure strikes it seems contemporary society is…
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When the two great anti-philosophers of modernity, Karl Marx and Jesus Christ, see eye-to-eye (Podcast)
Peculiarly synonymous in their bent towards action Marx and Christ should be in bed together again. The poor stock action has recorded amongst the disinterested middle of society makes such a suggestion increasingly attractive. Both Christianity and Marxism have emasculated themselves by a loss of integrity towards ‘action’. Hence a return to Marx and Christ…
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Shocking Britain: UK’s EU exit offers insights into power and change (Podcast)
After a long and messy partnership the UK’s exit from the EU represents a complex set of desires to renegotiate the Social Contract. Some of these might be to restore ‘charismatic power’ to a country used to ‘throwing its weight around in the world’. From Orwell’s common man to Debussy’s challenges to modern realities there…
DR STEPHEN GIBBS 