insights

“If clever people are so clever, why don’t they just make it simple.” - Stephen Forsyth

On 2 July 2004 the third annual FCG Beginning of Financial Year Lunch was held. It’s a time when some of the best independent external and in-house consultants in WA can get together and take an afternoon off.

We usually get about two dozen people coming along all of whom do a special type of work. Those attending find lots of encouragement in the energy of, what I would consider to be, the most inspiring group of people I know, not only for their professionalism but also in the perspective they bring to what they do.

Included within the usual suspects this year were Mark Hevron, Naomi Bickley, Peter Bennett, Anita Kelleher, Marie Finlay, Jeff Pow, Graeme Sutherland, Jenny Pope, Karen Lane, Penny McNiff, Kim Bridge and Troy Hendrickson.

We’ll all look forward to next year.

On Sunday I managed to catch The Corporation - the highlight documentary of the Revelation Film Festival. You will be hearing a lot more about this insightful and award winning independent release in the future.

Canadian and Sydney contacts had already told me to catch it and The Corporation didn’t disappoint. The documentary is based on Joel Bakan’s book “The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power which asks the interesting question:

“If the corporation is a person - what sort of person would it be?”

It’s a question no-one asked when 150 years ago we gave the incorporated entity all the legal rights of a natural person, but without the same social or moral obligations. The documentary answers the question with over 40 interviews of leading CEOs, social commentators, psychologists, leadership writers and activists. People like management writer Peter Drucker, nobel prize winning economist Milton Friedman, social scientist and critic Noam Chomsky and filmmaker Michael Moore provide insightful views.

For anyone who has ever wondered what the ‘corporate social responsibility’ issue is about, The Corporation candidly illuminates the existence of a blindspot that will eventually mean the social death of some of our largest corporate citizens.

For me the movie highlighted that, having left the question unanswered for so long, many CEO’s feel they no longer have the ability to guide and control the moral personality of the places in which we work. On the other hand, those who understand this movie will probably be the ones who will successfully manage the (inevitable) transition from ‘the Corporation’ to ‘the Corporate Citizen’.

The Corporation is screening on SBS on Wednesday January 5 at 8.30pm as Part 1 of a three part series.

Check it out: Synopsis

In a great talkback interview segment on Radio National this evening Sandy McCutcheon mentioned that the emergent blogger global community has grown from a handful of people pre-September 11 to now number around 1 million (and growing exponentially currently at 15,000 new blogs per day). The question raised was “Will blogs become the ‘coffee shops’ of the virtual world, providing a place to discuss and interpret truth within the mainstream media?”.

What blogging develops into will be very interesting. Following some general principles of the internet around ‘personal freedom of voice’ and ‘information discernment’ ~ expression with uniqueness may be one aspiration for the relevance of blogs such as ‘insights’.

Some of the political topical bloggers mentioned with crossovers into mainstream media were:

Tim Dunlop - Road to Surfdom
Ken Parish - Troppo Armadillo
John Quiggin - Crooked Timber