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Gunning For The President

 Gunning for the President The recent storming of Capitol Hill in Washington DC has caused widespread outrage.  However, amidst the condemnations of violence and shock that this could have happened in America, very little thought has been given to the relationships between leadership and motivation that give rise to such behaviour.  Trump supporters, just like the Brexit voters, support for LePenn in France and the AfD in Germany are united by a rejection of the global village, its multicultural values and liberal metropolitan leadership.  For many the convergence of technology and globalisation has outsourced their jobs and, through e-commerce, hollowed out their communities.  This is not to excuse violent behaviour, but simply labeling such views as crazy because of how they are expressed is to confuse the message with the medium and will not end well. The social and economic problems of both a digital economy and the pandemic have much in common.  Digital disruption challenges the l
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Innovation & Class War Goes Viral

The Covid-19 crisis, caused by the affluent elite, is hurting the poor unequally. As the initial shock of the Coronavirus crisis is passing the blame game has started, with China and the US trading insults and the WHO caught in the middle… countercurrents.org Beyond high level political polemics, there is a growing realisation that this crisis is not affecting people equally and that the economic order of things is undergoing rapid change. Undoubtedly the speed of the global spread of the pandemic has been facilitated by a globe-trotting elite. They represent the living face of the globalization of both production and consumption that is as central to economic growth as it has been to ecological decline and viral spread. Reams of paper have been consumed describing the heroic efforts and risks taken by doctors and nurses, with belated recognition of the sacrifices made, for very low pay, by carers and delivery couriers. However, in our rush to buy loo roll we have forg
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Thinking Smaller...

When species move out of balance with their ecosystem nature seeks to punish and return to balance. From the enlightenment humans have assumed a role as masters of nature; so-called anthropocentric thinking. The separation of humans from the rest of nature is, of course, nonsensical. However, it has been key in our efforts (in the words of McBurney) to stuff all of the worlds ecology into economics and it won’t go! All of our worries about business and economics are really for nothing unless we hear and address what is a clear ecological wake up call to the fact that human behaviour is unsustainable. The idea that humans would destroy the earth was, as noted by Lovelock, always far less likely than we would destroy ourselves; sinking under the weight of our own hubris. Make no mistake, Coronavirus is simply part of a wider ecological alarm call. We either find a way to reset the way we live and organise ourselves, as a species, or we will simply see more extreme wea
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Digital Divorce

The unprecedented events arising from the Coronavirus pandemic has created a paradoxical situation. On the one hand, the need for social distancing is creating a huge swing towards digital delivery of products and services and the replacement of physical meetings with digital platforms. As such, this may well be a defining moment, where the digital economy assumes a driving role in the global economy. On the other hand, as the virus has taken hold national governments have quickly abandoned international cooperation and retreated into national isolation; slamming borders shut, refusing the sharing and export of medical resources and protecting national industries. Nowhere has this been more evident than Europe, with citizens trapped in countries other than their own, as flights are canceled and borders closed. On top of a continent wide trend towards reactionary and nationalistic politics this may well also set the tone for the future. Going forward we face a world which is
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The New Nomads

The New Nomads The fusion of mobile phones and internet has blurred the distinction between the two and given rise to voice over internet telephony and mobile internet. The resulting culture of mobile communications has taken to the concept of the virtual office to a new level. The culture of self employment gave rise to the explosion of modular space/service flexible business centres during the 1990's. However mobile internet is enabling a growing number of both employed and self employed people to do away with the office almost entirely. Consultants, sales people, designers and marketing executives are all using the portability of laptops and especially mini-laptops combined with mobile internet to work from cafes, literally on the go. This has the triple advantage of reducing costs (coffee is cheaper than monthly floor rental), ensuring employees are connected and exposed to surrounding trends and provides greater autonomy and mastery at the individual
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Surfing The Wave: How Technology Affects Strategy

The convergence of technology and globalisation is changing the world.  This blog provides a short description of how it is changing value creation.  Back in the days before the internet, strategy was about securing value creation within business processes, products and brands.  However, writing in 1990 Prahalad recognised that technological change requires a focus upon core competence to be able to adapt a business to markets evolution.  As the internet started to take hold Hammer realised that global connectivity would wipe whole layers of processes and people from organisations. To prove his point he cited how Ford sales people now entered purchase data such that they could reduce accounts payable staff by 75%!  This led to a noisy fad for so-called business process re-engineering (BPR).  By the mid 1990s Arthur provided a prescient insight into the key characteristics which were re-shaping not just strategy, but economics itself.  He argued that wherever technology disrupts marke
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Infrastructure, ethics and people strategies

The UK is currently undergoing a crisis of identity, which is partly rooted in the question of the nation and what it means to British.  However, it is also about the infrastructure of the country and how it should be delivered. Underlying questions of service, performance, ownership, subsidies and so forth for the health service, railways, social services, education, and much else that make up the fabric of the country, are to what purpose we measure the success of these systems.  Are they purely utilitarian; to be measured by cost-benefit analysis, or are they some sort of metaphysical representation of the nation, the values it aspires to and central to the reproduction of civil society? These questions matter because, as the pioneer of privatisation and deregulated markets, the UK continues to blaze a trail that others, encouraged by institutions like the IMF, are following.  Furthermore the answers to these questions will, in the context of Brexit, have a dramatic impact upon th
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