Content
My writing and speaking
Where I host my musings on the question of faith, land, enterprise and England: depth, awe, purpose and place.
My hope is writing from a personal experience, people can place my thoughts into their context.
The Return of Spirituality & Religion
One hypothesis of this substack is that Western organisations are caught in a pincer like movement.
Externally, the non West is growing in political, demographic, financial and social power. And so is increasingly able to press its worldview. Spoiler, it is not the same as a secular western institution. Internally, Western culture is witnessing a reemergence of spiritual and religious ideas after decades of formal decline and statistics that masked a more complex picture.
“Spiritual Capital’: Has it come of age?
Building a company or a country is akin to baking a cake: you In economic circles these ingredients, these resources, are referred to as ‘capitals’: financial capital, human capital, natural capital. Resources you can use, steward and invest towards a common goal. Resources you can also deplete.
One capital that is ever present but rarely formally discussed, particularly in an enterprise context, is ‘Spiritual Capital’.
Here I bring my thoughts to my professional network and a follower base of c30,000 people.
You could say that the content is the professionally applied, downstream, practical application of the musings I do on Substack.
I have been in the ‘better business’ space almost my whole working life. I am also small c conservative by heart.
25 years ago when this space was in its infancy that was common, perhaps even the norm. Just as it was back with the great Victorian social entrepreneurs.
But a complete reversal has happened in the past 15 years, particularly the past 5 or so.
More conservative ideas and values have an awful lot to offer this arena.
Perhaps beauty really will save the world.
Before piling into assuming this is hopefully naive, sit with it.
In a world marred by conflict and suffering, 'beauty' might seem powerless and irrelevant.
But I am not referring to beauty as an aesthetic. That would be to beach in the shallows. The beautiful aesthetic points not to itself but to something else out in the deeps.
That is the beauty that might save the world.
Subscribe for videos drawn across my work on the sense that the flat, secular, high materialism of modernity has peaked and that a more fractal, spiritually open minded and 'enchanted' view of the world is re-emerging alongside it.
High success and responsibility is awash with character traps that are outsized in hazard, frequency and consequence vs the norm.
Today’s successful people significantly under invest in personal character development compared to their peers down the ages.
People who recognise their character as both asset and liability. Who recognise investing in it is not only healthy for them but has spin off benefits for other areas of life.
Organisational culture has been dominated by a more fixed, immovable, standardised worldview. A place where absolute certainty must reign. A world where thre is no grey, no ambiguity.
But we are moving into a time where things are less predictable, less universally applicable.
The challenge is to make ourselves more au fait and comfortable with understanding the opportunity and challenges presented by ambiguity.