Connecting with Culture - more by Peter Heslam

unleashing entrepreneurship

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 18:23:24 +0000

As the economic crisis deepens, redundancy is likely to be happening at a company near you. Many employers and governments will seek to soften the blow but the loss of skills and knowledge threatens to impoverish us all.

Key to the solution is entrepreneurship. While this requires no state programmes to initiate, governments that do assist aspiring entrepreneurs get good value for money – the average cost of a business start-up is less than the average annual cost of keeping a student at university, a prisoner in jail or a family on welfare.

Recovering Thrift to Solve the Credit Crisis

Fri, 19 Sep 2008 14:30:11 +0100

The credit crunch stems from a deeper moral and spiritual crunch. At stake is a virtue on which capitalism depends – thrift. Resolving the crisis will involve a recovery of this virtue.

Most westerners have long had access to grassroots saving institutions, such as building societies and credit unions. But recently, while commercial banks have focused their investment opportunities on ‘high net worth individuals’, financial institutions targeting the ‘sub-prime’ market have proliferated. The growth of this anti-thrift sector is partly responsible for the high levels of consumer debt that have become an accepted feature of advanced economies, but now threaten to undermine them.

Enterprising the Imagination in the Fight against Poverty

Fri, 09 May 2008 12:08:31 +0100

In the wake of natural disasters, the scale of human suffering defies comprehension. If we had trouble imagining the multiple lives and livelihoods that were wrecked by the Asian Tsunami and Hurricane Katrina, we will be even more hard-pressed now, when the full extent of the sufferings caused by Cyclone Nargis in Burma is shrouded by the military’s tight grip on the media.

When our visual imaginations fail us, our moral imagination needs to kick in. We see this in the rapid and vigorous response of governments, relief agencies, NGOs and faith groups to Burma’s unfolding tragedy. But there is another sphere of life that is allowing the moral imagination to play a role in its response to human need, though this is generally ignored or denied by the rest of civil society.

anita roddick

Fri, 28 Sep 2007 16:44:38 +0100

When Anita Roddick founded the Body Shop in 1976, there was nothing remarkable about hippyish lefties dreaming of a new order. No one guessed that, in pursuing her dream, this particular eco-worrier would build a multi-million-dollar global brand with a dominant high-street presence.

a silent revolution

Thu, 12 Jul 2007 23:11:11 +0100

Society is undergoing a silent revolution. It is not led by governments, though it has political ramifications; nor is it led by religious or academic institutions, though it has spiritual and intellectual dimensions. Leadership is coming from a far less likely sphere - business.

flirting with corruption

Fri, 20 Apr 2007 11:12:27 +0100

Being in love with a colleague is not a crime, even if you’re their boss. Paul Wolfowitz, the head of the World Bank, is not the first to find himself in this situation, and he won’t be the last.

setting the captives free

Sat, 24 Mar 2007 18:18:29 +0000

The year is 1780. A sailing ship is ploughing through heavy seas across the Atlantic, loaded almost to the gunwales with a cargo of human beings. They are chained together on narrow shelves, soaked in sweat, blood, vomit and excrement.

doing business with purpose

Fri, 24 Nov 2006 10:46:46 +0000

With the death last week of the Nobel laureate Milton Friedman, business lost one of its brightest and most influential gurus. His saying ‘There’s no such thing as a free lunch’ has become part of popular English usage, but in business circles his name is associated with another dictum: ‘The social responsibility of business is to maximise profits.’

an affluence for good

Fri, 10 Nov 2006 12:58:26 +0000

Before long, many of us will be sitting on Adam Smith. The governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, recently announced that the new £20 note, to be released next spring, will bear an image of the Scottish philosopher and inventor of economics.

a convenient truth

Fri, 13 Oct 2006 11:56:38 +0100

In some of the best stories, a supposed villain turns out to be a hero. Environmental campaigners are recovering from just such a surprise after hearing the Virgin boss Sir Richard Branson promise to commit all the profits from his transport companies over the next 10 years – a projected $3 billion (£1.6 billion) – to develop renewable forms of energy.

standing up to big business

Wed, 25 Jan 2006 09:03:06 +0000

Ever since Margaret Thatcher’s rise to power, the Conservative Party in the UK has been associated with the interests of big business.

Yet it looks, on the surface at least, as if all that’s about to change under the party’s new leader, David Cameron. As the media has widely reported, Cameron has pledged that a Conservative government would ‘stand up to big business’.

george and the chocolate factory

Tue, 04 Oct 2005 20:20:59 +0100

It’s a testimony to the creative power of the imagination that Charlie and the Chocolate Factory has become a huge box-office success. That power is skilfully reflected in the faces of the five children who visit the factory, and in the enchanting tour of the factory led by its effusive though loopy proprietor, Willy Wonka. The result is a tantalising moral fable that should appeal, on different levels, to all the family.

Live 8 and the G8

Wed, 13 Jul 2005 15:16:28 +0100

A year that began so tragically in the wake of the Asian Tsunami could yet be remembered as a turning point in the fight to help the world’s poor. Poverty has always been with us but it has never been so high on the agenda of the rich countries as now, thanks to the concerted efforts of campaigners, celebrities, politicians and the public to ‘make poverty history’.

make poverty history

Tue, 18 Jan 2005 13:14:56 +0000

I’ve long dreamed of what I’d like to do when I’m old: to take my grandchildren to a museum to see what absolute poverty was like in developing countries at the start of the 21st century, before it was eradicated and dispatched to the annals of history.

the corporation

Fri, 19 Nov 2004 09:16:27 +0000

‘Imagine your company were a person. What kind of person would it be?’

It’s a popular question among management consultants and executive coaches on company away-days. However, according to legal definitions, the corporation already is a person – to the extent, at least, that it enjoys all the rights to life, liberty and property as an individual human being.