I don’t mean the type of adulterous scooter socialism enjoyed by French President Francois Hollande – I mean an agile and nimble State that is deftly able to do more with less. Kinky like an inflection point in a trend line. Kinky as in ‘crinkled’ and ‘intertwined’ and ‘complex’ and ‘strikingly unconventional’. Kinky like talk about the rise of smart power in a multi-polar world – because this is the new practical reality, not because the laissez-faire types won the ideological debate about the size of the state. Quite the contrary, it’s dangerous to mistake coincidence for causality.
Tag: social business initiative
Social investing : fixing capitalism with capitalism
Capitalism – in its current form – has let us down. We have seen this truism manifest itself globally, from the disruptive protests of the “Occupy” movements to mainstream debates such as Capitalism in Crisis, the in-depth series that the Financial Times ran at the beginning of 2012.
#OccupyLSX camp outside London Stock Exchange/ St Paul’s Cathedral in 2011 (image digitally altered from original)
Global Impact Economy Forum. US State Dept, Washington DC, 26 & 27 April 2012
I recently went to Washington to learn about the new global impact economy being advocated by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and specifically to find out whether it is aligned with social business and social investment initiatives in Europe. Indeed, there is much more commonality than disparity, and (hopefully) this is the beginning of […]
The Road Less Travelled: Social Business in Europe
Call it a new kind of capitalism. You make goods to sell to a mass market but your aim isn’t profit. Enterprises are run by workers and customers and surpluses are ploughed back to achieve social goals. Capitalism? Not as we know it. Karl H Richter, co-ordinator of the task force for a European Social […]