We have a major concern of inequality in the UK. The recent Financial Times article, “ Unequal Recovery: middle feels the squeeze ” notes how in the UK, inflation is outpacing wage growth and income inequality continues to rise. Much of the attention and research has focused on the struggling middle classes and the growing income gap, but the real squeeze not being talked about is on children and the elderly.  The UK has the worst figures for child incarceration, child poverty and poverty of elderly in comparison to any other Anglo-American economy.
Figures coming out of one of the most right wing think tanks in the UK, the Institute for Fiscal Studies and also from the National Statistical Office indicate that 33-34% of children in the UK are living on or below the poverty line. The statistics also indicate that in any month there are 3,000 [...]

Two types of social revolution have taken place over the last decade and are continuing to take place again right now. The first are the coloured revolutions of Moldova, Serbia, Ukraine, and Georgia, whereby a lot of effort has been put into regime change, or actual political structural change, coming from bottom up. This has been very much an Anglo-American driven policy, where hundreds of millions of pounds have been spent on youth groups, women’s groups, and sports groups, among others. A second type of revolution, which is happening in the whole of the Middle East right now, is referred to as the ‘Scented’ revolution or the ‘Jasmine’ revolution, namely the scent of the Middle East itself. So what we are seeing is a very interesting geopolitical trend that we have witnessed for the last ten to twelve years, now manifesting itself in the Middle East. Interestingly enough, [...]

Late in 2010, I contributed an article to Reuters’ Great Debate UK blog. This was at the same time that my colleagues and I found that the City of London was sitting on £450 billion of “lazy funds”. In the Reuters article, I argue for a change in philosophy in how money is invested: rather than privatise gain and socialise debt, as the current economy is doing, we need to be socialising capital.
You can read the full article ‘What to do about the City’s “Lazy Funds”‘ on the Reuters Great Debate UK blog :

Looking ahead to 2011, I think global conflict will be a major issue. The second issue is the reaction of governments to bankers’ bonuses and I think governments will do nothing about that whatsoever. For me, almost everything else falls into second place because until these two issues are sorted out, I don’t know how we’re going to make progress in other areas. Regarding bankers’ bonuses, we need increased government regulation and increased transparency. We also need a political movement to see if we can genuinely get stakeholder financing at a national level, and the only way I can see that is ultimately if, as unimaginable as it may seem, Europe becomes one country. If Europe did become one nation state, the stakeholder financing philosophy of Germany and the Scandinavian states would probably begin to have world significance and a different form of investment would take place; a [...]

Here is a presentation I gave at the European Academy of Management (EURAM)’s conference in Rome last May, on the moral hazards that need to be addressed in the aftermath of the global financial crisis:
Auditing Moral Hazards for Post-Global Financial Crisis (GFC) Leadership
View more presentations from kakabadse .

Last week I was quoted in an article on Time.com about the recent violence in the central Nigerian city of Jos . From the article:
Andrew Kakabadse, professor of international management development at the U.K.-based Cranfield School of Management, says oil companies have at various times pitted ethnic factions against one another for economic gain. [...]

MP expenses continue to dominate the news in the UK, and I have to say it: the House of Commons is a cesspit of medieval privilege. It’s a mess. MP expenses are just one example of the privilege and ‘old boy’ advantage-taking going on. Look at how an MP gets a motion on the floor. It’s difficult to comprehend the privilege, status, committee work, and administrative arrangements that are necessary. [...]

The issue of MP expenses has stormed back into the spotlight in the UK today after the Telegraph revealed explicit details from MP receipts . MPs who have been called out on their expenses (in particular Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, former defense minister Geoff Hoon, and now Gordon Brown and Jack Straw) say they are working within the rules, but the media has portrayed them as taking unfair advantage and using taxpayer funds for their personal use. MPs need to improve the public’s understanding of what they do, and this can only be accomplished through greater transparency. [...]

Let’s take a look at the corporate strategy of the large financial institutions that played an instrumental role in bringing on the financial crisis. The chief executives at these companies tended to favor an aggressive leadership style, which for a long time led them to aggressive growth; as they acquired companies, the largest companies became ‘financial supermarkets’ with a whole range of services. These financial institutions grew and grew, but eventually reached a point around 2004 where their growth stopped. The leadership of many of these companies started to be criticized for not integrating their acquisitions well. And so chief executives responded by making their companies more governance-oriented, with new constraints for things being signed off by teams. These new protocols and procedures made the financial institutions stabilize and stop growing, but they didn’t prevent the financial crisis, and the whole sector is now suffering as banks (and [...]

At the G20 and elsewhere, we’ve heard government leaders like Obama and Brown calling for more regulation to prevent financial institutions from growing too large to fail and obfuscating their responsibilities. These calls are all well and good, but they aren’t a panacea. The problem with too much regulation is that it slows down markets and hampers growth. The ‘greedy bankers’ that have been reported on so often in the press aren’t the problem—they’re only the symbol. They’ve just been following procedures in a marketplace incentivised by short-term thinking and by imbalanced approaches to risk-taking. [...]