Author: bloggulentgreytripe

AMERICA goes to the polls on 3 November. The popular vote (aggregate of all votes) is trumped by an Electoral College system. Small states are kept warm to the federation by being gifted proportionally more Electoral votes than larger counterparts. Enviably, independent states act as countries within a country. By contrast, post-war statism continues to…

THE DREAM CITY megachurch Phoenix, Arizona, hosted Donald Trump last month. Supporters waited in 110-degrees for the Students for Trump event. Covid’s damage to the US economy is affecting Mr Trump’s re-election chances. 128,000 deaths are a tragedy. Politically it is clearing some of the path for rival Joe Biden. During his Arizona trip Mr…

ON the morning of 26th July 1945 Britain woke up to the results of the General Election. The Daily Mail newspaper warned the Labour Party to ‘accept an adverse verdict like men and not like spoilt children’. As the day wore on it became clear the Conservative Party was in trouble. Duncan Sandys, Winston Churchill’s…

ONCE UPON A TIME an organisation had supercharged leadership, new buildings, expanded vision, ‘wrong people’ fired, ‘right people’ hired, but, the toilets did not get cleaned. Then, by magic, they were sparkling. What, pray, made the difference?: “Management spoke to us,” said the cleaning staff. And so they lived happily ever after in the Land of Increased Productivity.…

IN a media saturated moment here are some tangents that offer a ‘voice from elsewhere’. With the leadership space being dominated by the Immediate Actions of crisis leaders this is in the spirit of dialogue-on-the-margins which travels a little more slowly through this period. There is a suggestion here that a ‘dialogical approach’ is useful…

ONE very successful CEO said to me that every now and then he enters his office, shuts the door, drops the blind and does nothing all day and then goes home. As shocking as that is to a workforce who can’t do that, or can’t do it as easily, the truth is that often when…

AUTHORITY is not what it once was. In 1950s Britain it was located within social hierarchies, collectivised industries and nation-based politics. Efforts to distribute that power via popular culture were successful. My four older sisters took to Sixties culture in various forms. Our Edwardian, war-time and now late parents looked on mainly in bemusement, remaining…

English philosopher Gillian Rosemary Rose died tragically young. Her thesis is that contemporary lives are functioning in ‘the broken middle’ between the ideal and real. My thesis increasingly is senior leadership is working in this space. Between ecology and economy, law and ethics (life), church and state, theory and practice, charisma and thought and so…

WWII is high up the media schedules with this summer’s 75th Anniversary of D-Day. Listening to British journalist Richard Dimbleby reporting during the early hours of 6th June 1944 as British 6th Airborne Division aircraft take the first paratroops into action is breathtaking sound and text. The story of that war remains up for re-telling.…

UK businesses responded to the 2008 global economic crash with admirable flexibility. Re-structured working arrangements avoided knee-jerk redundancies typical of market down-turns. I put this down to three things: a) better business-educated UK management, b) willingness to collaborate across the workforce and c) the shift to what I term ‘lighter business models’*. Management education and…