Towards Meaningful Change and a Better Society
With the summer recess fast approaching, here’s a quick update on a selection of Jericho’s live programmes, interspersed with some thoughts and opinions from Jericho partners and friends.
If you would like to be involved with any of our work, please get in touch.
A Good Society Needs Good Work
The Good Work agenda took centre stage at CIPD’s June Festival of Work. Some of the best and most avant-garde thinking from the Good Work community came together in a series of interactive sessions tackling diversity and inclusion in the workplace. The workshops provided an opportunity to convene important but difficult conversations in safe spaces. Click here to read the blogs from the day exploring Menopause; Race at Work and LGBTQ+ identities (coming very soon); video highlights are below.
Elsewhere, change at the top of the business tree is also needed, Jericho partner Matthew Gwyther argues, in his latest piece for The Times. “It’s wall-to-wall grief: incessant demands and impossible objectives in a business world that becomes more arduous, disrupted and complex each year”. Referencing an earlier event when Jericho hosted an evening with Gavin Patterson, ex-CEO of BT, Matthew asks: who’d be a boss these days? Still less a FTSE 100 CEO?
A Caring Society
The provision of social care presents a huge challenge for us all. Current approaches to commissioning and delivering are already creaking under the pressure – and that’s before the care burden inevitably grows. Across the sector, there are pockets of innovation, as local authorities and social and technology entrepreneurs find new ways to meet demand and improve the quality of care people receive. Transformational change is needed.
This latest update, authored by Alex Khaldi, Partner and Head of Social Care Insights at Grant Thornton, captures the key themes of the third in a series of discussions as part of the Caring Society programme. Changemakers from across the public and private sectors came together to try to understand what needs to happen to enable innovation to flourish and create new models for how we care for each other as a society.
A Better Society seeks Social Justice in Tech
Following an initial provocation from Jericho partner Margaret Heffernan and an exploratory roundtable in partnership with Stifel, the Social Justice in Tech Programme is now progressing well, with a series of events and content pieces lined-up for the autumn.
Read the first write-up and listen to the inaugural podcast, hosted by Matthew Gwyther, with contributions from Eithne O’Leary and Thom Weisel of Stifel, Check Warner of Diversity VC, Margaret Heffernan, Caroline Plumb and ex-Minister of State Ed Vaizey.
Further perspective is provided by Jericho partner, Deborah Doane, in a recent piece for Rights CoLab. “Want to control the tech giants? Stop trying to control the tech itself” she writes. We need solid frameworks provided by company law, competition law, and lobbying regulations to hold the tech sector to account. With a constant revolving door between tech companies and government: “green regulations, financial regulations, trade and tech rules — all are designed by the subjects of the regulations themselves. This results in weaker rules that can have negative impacts on our rights, our freedoms, and our democracies”.
Ideas to Build a Better Britain
Discussions in Belfast and Swansea (write-up coming soon) completed the 2018/19 nationwide listening & learning tour, as part of the ‘Ideas to Build a Better Britain’ series, convened on behalf of BRE Group.
Hosted by Camden Council and addressed by Deputy Mayor of London, Jules Pipe, changemakers within the community came together in June in London to share insights and ideas from and for the programme – with some original and quite punchy new thoughts and recommendations emerging. A summary Think Piece will be published later this summer – in the meantime you can read the interim report here (and, as ever, listen to the podcast).
A Better Society supports Responsible Tax
The Responsible Tax project – convened and curated on behalf of KPMG, continues its global journey. An updated Case Study will be published later this summer, written by KPMG’s global Head of Tax & Legal, Jane McCormick – the driving force behind the project along with Chris Mrogan, Global Head of Tax Policy.
June saw roundtables in Dublin (“Tax & Trust”) and Brussels (“Corporate Taxation in a Digital World”) – as ever, bringing together a range of diverse and dissenting expert voices from the corporate and political worlds, academia and civil society. The Responsible Tax web platform is packed with interesting and informative articles from a variety of contributors – check it out.
And finally…
In his latest piece on OpenDemocracy, Neal Lawson discusses the mess “progressives” are in on Brexit. We need to give each other space to work-through our differences or even disagree on short term tactics while we build for the long term and radical response Brexit demands.
And you can also listen to Jan Gooding’s recent podcast interview for Marketing Week: hear about (among other things) how Jan’s skills as a marketer helped her become an “accidental activist”; her “career limiting” inability to stand-by and keep quiet on issues; and why marketers have a responsibility to be positive changemakers.
We are all activists now
Please do get in touch if you would like to find out more; join one of our programmes; or work with Jericho as a client or a change-maker.
Here’s to a sunny summer…
Rebecca Perrin
Programme Executive
July 2019
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