Theatre - the best business school there is?

I went to the theatre twice over the weekend..the first time to see "Enron" and the second to see a brilliant youth theatre production of "The Grapes of Wrath". Both were very different in style: the first a high-tech, energetic, glitzy view of the rise and fall of the world's most notorious energy trading company and the second a low-budget telling of the systematic dispossession and brutalisation of tenant farmers in America's dustbowl of the 1930's.

I came away from both thinking, quite apart from the qualities of the two productions and the performances in them, that theatre often reminds us far more powerfully and directly than can a thousand newspaper articles or pieces of academic research what some of the most important principles are on which society and business have to be organised:

• Too much power concentrated in too few hands rarely produces desirable social or economic outcomes: the landowners, fruit producers and county sheriffs that systematically dispossessed, exploited and terrorised tens of thousands of migrants workers from Oklahoma to California were NOT doing the American economy any favours. (They directly contributed to the degradation of huge tracts of arable land and to the waste of tons of produce in an attempt to artificially keep prices high). Nor were Jeffrey Skilling and his colleagues at Enron - the company lobbied for the deregulation of energy supplies in the US and then exploited loopholes in the legislation to leave California beset by power shortages that imposed real economic costs.
  
  
• Human beings are always likely to be swept along by irrational manias : whether it is stock analysts falling over themselves to talk up Enron shares or desperate farmers embarking on a harzardous journey of 2,000 miles with their families in search of a "promised land" despite plenty of evidence that conditions in California were actually appallingly harsh, people do like the sense of excitement and hope that they can experience in the midst of a collective mania. Cynical people will always seek to exploit this (Enron's management encouraging their staff to sink their life savings into buying company stock options that were ultimately worthless); and governments and regulators and shareholders would do well always to remember it and act accordingly.
  
  
• Manias can nevertheless lead to the creation of important economic and social assets: at the end of "Enron", Jeffrey Skilling is given a speech in which he makes the point that many of the most important technological advances in recent human history (eg the canals, the railways and the internet) have been associated with major boom and bust cycles in the stock market. His point is that without the huge wave of energy, enthusiasm, financial investment and euphoria that these events created, the technological advances may not have occurred or would have occurred far more slowly.

All these are well-understood points in most business schools of course. But how effectively and elegantly and concisely are they communicated in the average MBA programme compared to spending 4 hours at two highly enjoyable theatre productions?

Cadbury's - money, meaning and chocolate

Thousands of words have been written about the hostile takeover of Cadbury Schweppes by Kraft and no doubt many more will be written in the future. A lot of focus has been placed on the purely financial aspects of the transaction - the share price at which the Cadbury's board finally felt they had no choice but to recommend the deal, the amount of debt Kraft is taking on to finance the deal, the crucial role played by hedge funds in loosening up enough shares to make the deal feasible, the huge profits they stand to make from it and so on.

Other writers have focused on the possible consequences of the deal for the Cadbury's workforce (with job losses beng described as "inevitable" by outgoing Cadbury's chairman Roger Carr) or for Britsish industry more widely. While these issues are of course highly important, I've been trying to work out why the news just strikes me in some hard-to-get-at way as profoundly sad and regreattable. After all..Cadbury Schweppes is a multinational in its own right which has hoovered up many much-loved brands and commendable smaller companies (eg Green & Blacks) along the way. So why should I feel any sentimental attachment to it as an independent company that extends much beyond whether I still like the taste of Dairy Milk or not?

The answer occurred to me this morning in a weird flashback to junior school days. When I was 8 or so, Cadbury's ran a national essay competition for schools. We were shown a film about where chocolate came from, how the coca beans were grown in West Africa, were brought to England and turned into chocolate bars in Bournville and about how Cadbury's had been set up in the early 19th century and were model enlightened employers . Several children entered essays from our school and I was one of several winners - and had the excitement of six or so different Cadbury's chocolate bars arriving in the post for me a little while later. (And that felt like the riches of Croesus).

So in that one small episode, I had new knowledge about the world, a sense of what an English company did, of its history and the particular history of a place (Bournville) that I could conceivably visit and some delicious products I could eat all rolled up into one. And I realised that one of the many reasons why industry is important is because such enterprises DO imbue our communities and landscapes and towns with a tangible and mysterious and magical sense of place and drama and achievement - and we feel a sense of belonging with them too, however remote. And this does not happen, by and large, with service industries or administrative offices - who was ever thrilled by the sense of knowing how management consultants work or by having a call centre as the local large employer?

And..if we allow our industries and long-established companies to be parcelled up and sold off one by one by venture capitalists and corporate predators and hedge fund managers, as so many have already been, we lose not just jobs or brand names or political face - we lose something of our history, our sense of community and of ourselves.

The Moral Economy - 1

I went to a really interesting and inspiring event this morning: a talk by Stewart Wallis of NEF about the "moral economy". The audience was a gathering of folk from the arts world and Stewart's theme was the current and coming global economic, ecological and social crisis and what part the arts might play in responding to and addressing it. Stewart's analysis of the failings of the current economic system seemed to me to be spot on:

• Our consumption of finite natural resources and our damage to natural ecosystems is simply unsustainable
• The distributions of income and wealth within and between economies have reached grotesque and historically unprecedented levels in the last few decades
• The global economy is unstable - as the recent banking crisis has demonstrated all too painfully
• "More is no longer better" - in the West, we are no longer being made happier or have higher levels of wellbeing as a consequence of having more material possessions. Instead we have record levels of depression and other mental illnesses.

In response to this situation, we need a revolution in social values - away from seeking only to maximise narrowly-defined financial profit or personal financial wealth or national GDP and towards a more holistically-defined concept of personal and social wellbeing. I would add that we need to (re?)discover the ability to think and decide from the standpoint of what will benefit us all, not just what will benefit ourselves or our immediate families. In other words, we need to make a transition to a "moral economy" in Stewart's terms.

The arts community is surely in a potentially powerful position to respond to and help address some of these challenges. Theatre, literature, film/TV and the visual arts in particular can be powerful media for radically new ideas and imaginings about how society could be organised to be developed and communicated, to large numbers of people at once and to some extent by-passing the often reactive and sometimes plain obstructive forces of government and the mainstream media.

So..perhaps we need not only creative works that show us how things are (pace Dickens, Zola, Steinbeck, An Inconvenient Truth, Enron, Guernica etc) but some imaginative and radical works that show us how things could be..in a constructive sense rather than the Hollywood disaster movie sense (or even The Age of Stupid).

We also need to engage whole communities in a multi-stranded debate about how society needs to change in very practical ways - and arts venues and facilities and their community programmes could be important resources to be used in that process.

An ancient idea whose time has come?

The Guardian had a very interesting piece this morning about a resurgence in the ancient idea, common to many cultures and religious traditions, that usury (charging excessive rates of interest on loans, above a legally-sanctioned maximum rate) is wrong and should be prohibited.

This has a real resonance at the moment, I think - in the middle of the worst economic depression since the 1930s, with unemployment rising sharply, government finances in a terrible state, people's pensions being undermined by low interest rates and asset prices, the news headlines are now becoming tiresomely full again of bankers and the enormous sums of money they are paying themselves again as bonuses. And with base lending rates at an historic low of 0.5%, the fact that banks and credit card companies are in many cases still charging interest rates of 20% or more on personal loans and card balances is wholly unacceptable from any sort of reasonable ethical standpoint.

Perhaps it is time that we looked for ways to democratise the financial system, so that the benefits from money circulating round the economy are more widely shared and not just scooped by a small number of bank executives in bloated personal bonuses. There are a number of new ventures such as Zopa which offer a promising alternative to traditional bank savings and loans - maybe these are the way forward?

The transition to action

We held the second public event of our local Transition Towns project, Transition Westcombe, this week. It built on the ideas for specific projects and actions which came out of the discussions during our launch event and it was great to be in a room buzzing with the energy of people energetically discussing setting up food stalls for locally grown produce, training sessions in a wide range of skills, mapping locally available expertise, a community cafe and much much more. It was a great reminder that, in an age of great cynicism about "conventional politics" and a widespread feeling of powerlessness in the face of global issues like climate change, people DO respond with great energy and inventiveness when they see that there is something they can practically do to change things, that is within their control.

Renewable energy..what IS going on?

So..let's get this straight...

• Peak oil is arriving any time soon, we are told..
• Crude oil prices last summer were briefly at $150 a barrel before the demise of Lehmann Brothers pushed the world financial markets into meltdown and the economy into recession...
• Scientists are issuing ever-more dire warnings about the rate of global warming and the likelihood of "non-linear" climate change
• The UK government has committed to a target of 20% of our energy being generated from renewable sources by 2020
  
• Domestic energy bills in the UK remain at historically high levels despite the recent retreat in oil prices and yet....

Shell and BP have both recently announced major cutbacks in their renewable energy investment plans and manufacturing capacity, in Shell's case stating that they think the only forms of renewables they see as being commercially viable are biomass and carbon sequestration.

What is going on here? Normally, companies will invest in new technologies and products they see as having a long term future even if the initial investment costs are high and they know that it will take some time to reap the full benefits through building up economies of scale as the market for the products develops.

So..are two of the three largest global energy companies really saying that they think wind power, solar and hydro have no part to play in meeting the world's energy needs over the coming decades? If so..why? Do they think that the technologies to produce energy from these sources are so constrained by physical and social limitations that they will never be technically efficient? And if so...are the government and the renewable energy sector deluding themselves and the rest of us in claiming that they CAN be an important part of the solution?

Or are the energy majors just the wrong companies to be looking to to take renewables forwards, unable to make an effective transition from a world in which "big oil" has powered decades of unprecedented global economic growth to a world in which big may no longer be beautiful and culturally incapable of the sort of imaginative and creative innovations which could make renewables viable even on a domestic scale?

I think we should be told!

Why don't we...?

I was talking yesterday with a group of friends about schools and the seemingly endless agonies of choice which parents have to go through to find the right school for their children, be it junior or secondary school. State or private? Local or out of borough? What's the reputation like? How did they do in the latest league tables? How many places do they have? what is the admissions process? etc etc etc

A common problem is that once a school gets a bad reputation (whether deserved or not), parents no longer want to send their kids there if they feel they have a choice. So a lot of the brighter children with better, more supportive home environments don't go and the schools concerned then have a much higher concentration of children from more difficult backgrounds. So the school's reputation and league table performance then suffer even more..and a vicious circle is established.

So why don't we do what they do in France and much of the rest of Europe and simply say that children will go to their local schools and remove the exhausting and frequently illusory process of "parental choice"? And..if a school is not performing to an adequate standard, ensure that there are clear mechanisms by which parents, teachers, governors and students can rectify matters so that it DOES perform? And while we're at it, let's insist on ALL schools teaching emotional intelligence and communication skills to their students at all levels. Some do this already and it makes a great difference for the better to the school's atmosphere and culture and to the confidence and behaviour and attitude of the students - so why not all?