Reluctant Optimism – What Worlds will Business Need to be Successful in the Future?
1-2.30 Tuesday 25 February 2014
IDS Convening Space

STEPS Seminar: Mick Blowfield and Leo Johnson on reluctant optimism and future cities by Stepscentre on Mixcloud

Michael Blowfield
Professor Corporate Responsibility, Wolverhampton; Senior Visiting Research Associate, Oxford; Fellow, London Business School

Leo Johnson
Co-Founder, Sustainable Finance; Visiting Business Fellow, Smith School of Enterprise & Environment, University of Oxford

Do we have the rights to optimism? Can capitalism deliver a next great wave of growth? The seminar builds on the arguments made in “Turnaround Challenge: Business and the city of the future”, one of the top selling and most critical business books of 2013-2014. In the seminar we want to dissect the nexus of social, economic, environmental and governance crises confronting global society, and a series of colliding megatrends that are reshaping the potential opportunities for growth.

To examine this, we use the metaphor of three emerging cities: the Petropolis, the alluringly familiar but decreasingly resilient city, locked into the century old technologies of fossil fuel-driven mass production; Cyburbia, the city of mass production on the steroids of IT – the latest manifestation of science fictions city without pain; and the Distributed City where technology is deployed with the intent to connect us not virtually.  These are the cities of society’s future, and they have very different implications for the meaning of prosperity and business success, as well as our ability to navigate the social, economic, and environmental megatrends confronting us.

Many of these ideas are explained in Turnaround Challenge, but the book was only ever meant as a starting point for a much wider debate about achieving lasting prosperity.  Therefore, we hope the seminar is an opportunity not only to discuss our work, but to explore how it relates to the ideas of others, now and looking ahead.

Seminar chaired by Prof Peter Newell, Sussex University.

All welcome