I will keep it quick this quarter and focus on the resources and opportunities now available to you on sustainable leadership, collaboration, and currency innovation.
Collaboration
My paper on a needed revolution in collaboration between business and NGOs will appear in the JCC academic journal in June. I wrote this to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the publication of my first book, In the Company of Partners. I gave a lecture about that to our international MBA students and invited guests, and it’s been nicely produced here.
The next course offer from IFLAS on this topic is the “Skills for Leading Teams” course over 3 days in June. That is a wonderful time to visit the Lake District. Led by IFLAS Doctoral Researcher Jo Chaffer, the course will be a special experience and I look forward to seeing some of you there. The module is also part of our MA in Leadership Development. The foundational 6-day residential for that is also in the Lake District, and starts 12th September.
Sustainable Leadership
The special issue of the SAMPJ academic journal is now complete and will appear in September. It features a paper “Beyond Unsustainable Leadership” which I wrote with Richard Little (Impact International) and Dr Neil Sutherland (UWE). I will present this in Carlisle on July 17th. My research in leadership has been recognized with a prize from a Swiss institute, who will host me in June to discuss implications for leadership within the United Nations system.
Our number of doctoral students focusing on these topics grows, with Aimee Leslie of WWF joining us to explore how leaders in the environmental sector interpret the tragedies as well as successes in this line of work. Speaking of environmental tragedy, the video for my talk at Griffith University on getting real about what troubles climate change presents us is online here.
The Institute continues to animate discussion on these topics, with former RGS VP and TV personality Paul Rose and fashion designer Vivienne Westwood both speaking about sustainable leadership on our Ambleside Campus this summer. These are some of the 10 free public events IFLAS is organising to celebrate the 10th Anniversary of the University of Cumbria.
If you are wondering how we approach sustainability and why we think the heritage and landscape of the Lake District matters in what we do, I recommend my Inaugural Lecture, and some thoughts I shared on our research at IFLAS.
Currency Innovation
In March, more people completed our free Money and Society MOOC than ever before. We hosted 30 of them at a summit in London, which was also part of our PGC in Sustainable Leadership. We are delighted the Finance Lab also offered one free fellowship for 6 months for alumni of our MOOC. We look forward to hosting them on their retreat in the Lake District this summer.
In May I will be presenting a paper on the future of complementary currencies in an age of blockchains at the joint academic-practitioner RAMICS conference in Barcelona. We will be explaining the proposal for a new Credit Commons Collective to create the protocols and tools for the massive scaling of socially useful new currencies. I’m also helping organise a workshop there for PhD researchers and then, a first for me, helping with a hackathon to develop some of the software that is needed. I’m pleased to be working with my PhD student Leander Bindewald and MOOC colleague Matthew Slater on these efforts.
I have long advocated these solutions for Greece, and in June will be presenting the ideas and tools with Matthew to community groups and local government at the RIPESS event in Athens and then will guest lecture on a course a few hours north near Volos, with the commercial barter guru Tom Greco (course info here).
The common theme of all this stuff is enabling people to lead collaboration for meaningful change in an unstable environment. I hope to continue doing that in various ways, new and old, in the coming years.
Professor Jem Bendell 