Blogs

`Meeting of the Minds’. While his sounds like a kind of NLP based dating game for the over-educated, it was in fact a gathering in London last night of a small number of leading civil servants, business people and social entrepreneurs. In Admiralty House, under oils of `The Battle for Martinique’ and other British naval glories, we discussed how the sectors could, just maybe, take working together to the next level. On my table we were joined by Ray Mills of PWC, Rolande Anderson who hea...

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Despite the commitment to public sector reform from all political ­parties, it is still unclear which ideas will dominate as we reshape public services in the coming decade. There are calls for locally-based, co-produced and self-directed public services, but there is an easier approach to reform that is much further advanced: super-commissioning, or the aggregation of different workstreams and small contracts into ever-larger contracts for high-volume services, delivered mostly by big natio...

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Big charities going under. A rash of major mergers. Mass-sackings of CEOs. Fall-outs with Government. My predictions for 2009 all turned out to be wrong, in fact, it was business as usual for many of us. So am I eating humble pie? Well - no. I think I was right in everything - except my timing. Our sector, you see, is a bit like the public sector - trapped by its recent history. With noble exceptions, most of our major charities are simply doing a better job than the Government of deliverin...

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Trusteeship. This touches on my life from many angles. I am a Trustee – of Impetus Trust, a social investor. I am a CEO who works to a board of Trustees. I have also set up about five organisations all of which have needed a Board of Trustees to run them. Within Boards I have played all the roles. Chair (twice). Secretary (three times) – but never Treasurers. I have seen good boards, bad boards and goddamn ugly ones. Unlike the Golden Eagle – of which there is only one type – there are a...

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