Last year we worked on a pro-bono project for Action for M.E. (the UK’s largest charity for people with M.E.) 

One of the results that emerged from our collaborative workshops with their leadership team was that they should focus on leading a …

We are very proud to have been asked by Management Today to contribute to their How To? Issue published this February, specifically on the subject of How to have good ideas.  You can read the interview with our Founding Partner…

We at The Foundation are proud of our network and are always keen to help people we know connect to other folk we know, be it through parallels, our Forum events or just to help people achieve the outcomes they are…

Answer:  They all feature in an article written by City journalist and Foundation Advisory Board member Anthony Hilton.  You can find out more and read Anthony’s article in the Independent here  http://virou.gr/xykRgm…

Download the report here This Human Business – The new bottom line is social

Written by Anthony Painter and commissioned in partnership with award winning communications agency Bondy Consulting…, This Human Business - the new bottom line is social  presents the case that

Yesterday marked the launch of The International Year of Sustainable Energy for All by the United Nations’ Secretary-General, HE Ban Ki-moon, at the World Future Energy Summit in Abu Dhabi. The Secretary-General’s objectives, to be achieved by 2030, are:

1.  To…

• What’s most likely to be sustained by the companies that are leading in this area?
• What are the most useful lessons for companies that haven’t been as bold yet?
• And what’s actually going to make the most useful difference to

…

Happy new year all! We’ve had a great start to 2012 with a new Senior Consultant, Natasja, joining the team last week. Please take a look at her of her full bio here and have a read of her fun …

In early October we held a thought provoking and exciting event on innovation in big companies – is it a waste of time, and if not, how do you do it?  From the points of view of Tim Sefton, Director…

… A serious concern for many at this time of year, and one which makes this TED talk essential viewing:

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/derek_sivers_how_to_start_a_movement.html…

Good luck starting the next dance craze, and merry Christmas from everyone at The Foundation!

Spirited.

A few weeks ago we had a team trip to Leander boat club where Olympic Champion Steve Williams helped us apply some principles he learnt training for the Olympics into business teamwork. It was a fantastic two days which…

We had a brilliant turnout at our forum event last week where the subject for discussion was ‘social innovation’. Our three speakers (Cliff Prior, Chief Executive of UnLtd…, the Foundation for Social Entrepreneurs, Alison Hutchinson, Chief Executive of the electronic

Going green needn’t restrict your holiday choices. The Guardian presents this year’s 20 most innovative eco-tourism projects, trips and places to stay, selected by an expert panel as well as Guardian readers themselves.…

This list is quite UK-centric with only 10 entries outside

I recently came across this interesting example of social innovation in action.  Sometimes the simplest ideas for the lowest cost investment have the biggest impact.

http://wimp.com/innovationfinest/…

While Coca Cola is usually at the top of most brand studies, it comes way down the list when asking people whether brands contribute to their “quality of life”. Those at the top of the recently released ‘Meaningful Brand Index’…

With consumers tightening their belts, and a series of bad news stories damaging public perceptions of a raft of different industries, it’s more critical than ever that brands build a strong and trusting relationship with their customers.

Why do customers…

James Alexander, one of our partners and also founder of Zopa (the marketplace where people lend and borrow money) talks about the financial and social reward of being part of a peer to peer money market.

View the clip on TEDX here…

The Foundation is now part of a new global network. It’s called the Growth Agenda, at www.growthagenda.com…, and we think it is an exciting addition to our approach and the skills we can easily access.  Our membership of this network is nothing to do with

Some exciting news that one of The Foundation’s partners, James Alexander (also ex-Strategy Director at Egg and previous founder of Zopa), will be speaking at two events this Autumn. The first is an Oracle… event about ’Banking on IT’ and the second is at the

However much the financial sector abused risk, business must not play safe. Instead, Management Today’s round table, featuring Foundation Partner James Alexander, says that companies should focus on opportunities with a limited downside – and have a balanced team.…

To follow the discussion

Today is founding partner Charlie Dawson’s birthday and the news has travelled far. You can read more about how his age has baffled scientists by clicking on this link http://www.newsbiscuit.com/1967/09/07/north-london-man-suddenly-very-old/…

Here is an interesting post on Business Fights Poverty about how a Twitter tag managed to raise a whopping £23,000 for Mohammed Ashraf Haziq, a 20-year old Malaysian student whose robbery by a gang who had appeared to be helping him…

Dr Abhay Bang could knock many an insight team into a cocked hat, so atuned is he to the needs of his customers (who, in this case, happen to be newborn babies and their mothers in one of India’s most deprived…

Business leaders face a choice: they can reform the system, or watch as government’s exert control.  A call to action from McKinsey’s Dominic Barton:

http://hbr.org/2011/03/capitalism-for-the-long-term/ar/1…

Some interesting musings from Martin Lindstrom this week on the culture of ‘more is more’: in this jam-packed world of tweets, status updates and scrolling news tickers, are consumers crying out for companies that cut through the noise and offer up only…

In his latest article for Management Today, Simon Caulkin enlists some expert help to examine the alternatives to today’s brand of capitalism

http://www.managementtoday.co.uk/features/1086015/saving-capitalism-itself/…

We enjoyed reading Anthony Hilton’s (Financial Editor of the Evening Standard and one of our Advisory Board members) perspective about the stock market turmoil last week: ‘Markets have lost faith in the politicians’…

A brilliant article by the Design Director at Ideo (the innovation consultancy) emphasises the unprecedented value of being bold enough to take prototypes out into the real world (and not just into the safe, confined settings of a focus group) in order to get real customer insights. V Water (the…

On the 26 May we put to the Foundation Forum an argument that trust in organisations is seriously threatened and may be irrecoverable, at least until they are set up so their purpose more closely matches the interests of those…

Mark Ritson’s article … in Marketing Week makes a powerful comment on how an unrelenting focus on core competencies tends to underpin business success.

His subject is Tesco and its foray into developing standalone brands, which he’s betting will fail. A

I’ve been hugely privileged to represent The Foundation at TED Global …this week – and I hope that this becomes an annual tradition for someone in the firm.  Why? – because much of our work is about helping our clients

This article appears in full in The Financial Times 09.06.11. An extract from this article about Ian Thwaites one of our Senior Consultants appears below or read the full article (pdf)…. Ian is soon to be joining Decode as their UK

Ed Smith, previously Global COO and Strategy Chairman of PWC, wrote an excellent report for the Work Foundation which looked especially at the effect of rules and regulation on the relationship between businesses and society, arguing that perversely, more rules…

Should business be more human? Or  does that make a large organisation too complicated to manage? Is success down to the people – John Lewis for example? Or are people the problem – bankers and bonuses for example?

In line with…

Quite an interesting read about how Puma is apparently the world’s first “major” company to put a value on the eco services it uses to create its products.  Essentially they are monetizing their environmental impact, putting a value of £57…

Fashion retailer New Look is embarking on a significant marketing drive aimed at raising the brand’s profile and creating greater engagement with consumers. This move by the retailer was championed by The Foundation who helped New Look to build their…

Fantastic TED talk by Simon Sinek, explaining the importance of a clear, well articulated and frequently communicated organisational purpose.  This inspires customers, staff and investors to connect with the core unchanging purpose of the organisation:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qp0HIF3SfI4…

This is one of the

This is a swift one pager showing, through the words of Lord Kirkham, the founder and until very recently owner and CEO of DFS, precisely what we mean by people in businesses seeing the world inside out (even when very…

Do big problems always require equally big solutions?

Rory Sutherland’s TED talk emphasises (using behavioural economics and some brilliant examples) that small, inexpensive and considered solutions can sometimes be more effective than flashy, expensive fixes.

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/rory_sutherland_sweat_the_small_stuff.html…

Here at The Foundation we believe that getting an ‘outside-in’ perspective on your business is crucial. What do your customers really think about your products or your services? What is their day to day experience like? Our clients often find…

Yahoo’s recent purchase of Indonesian social networking site Koprol, may not be headline news here in the UK, but it gives us a fascinating look into the social values and behaviours of Indonesia – are they really that different from…

Broadband and online shopping top The Foundation’s inaugural Innovation Index…

• Britons rank home broadband as the innovation that has contributed the most to their lives over the past decade
• Online shopping follows in second place
• Functionality and

Please click on the following link  ‘Doing the right thing’ to see an article by Anthony Hilton covering our most recent Forum discussion: ‘There is no such thing as an ethical business’.

Anthony Hilton is Financial Editor of the London Evening Standard and a …

Corporate Social Responsibility. That old chesnut. Well, you’re damned if you don’t and damned if you do, right? You declare your company’s goal as nothing more than profit, glorious profit (CSwhat? I thought that was a programme on the telly?)…

Sparked is a recently launched microvolunteering network, set up to connect volunteers with not-for-profit organisations. The premise is that there are lots of people out there with useful skills to offer and a desire to help – but not much…

One sunny afternoon at HarperCollins…

‘So Mr. McCandless you want to publish a book, tell me a bit more about it’
‘Well it’s going to be a book full of graphs’
‘Ah, I see. So you are going to create …

Another Foundation Forum, another evening of meaty discourse in the grand surroundings of The Arts Club. This time, it was the world of digital that was up for dissection – “Digital is now mainstream; the revolution is over” – and,…

We love this example… of how the apparently subtle act of changing a user interface button on a website from ‘Register’ to ‘Continue’ can result in breath-taking results. A lesson in the importance of understanding your customer and the nature

John Kay has recently written a fantastic book on obliquity.  He shows how businesses that focus on customer value (rather than profits) are often the most commercially successful. We’ve recently been working with the Lean Enterprise Academy…, who explained

HSBC has an internal team responsible for customer experience around the world.  50 people have to change the way 330,000 people work, improving things for more than 100 million customers.  A first priority in 2009 was to look innovatively at…

It’s not often you see a business stick its neck above the parapet to promise something, that by all accounts, is incredibly difficult to achieve. That’s what our client Marks & Spencer did recently with the launch of its new…

Ray Eitel-Porter – the data analyst’s view…

To champion a blind reliance on data, divorced from intuition, would be a foolhardy move. But to overlook the potential for data to help us make better decisions would be equally unwise.

When

“Merci” in Paris offers designer clothes at discounted price, second hand books (along with the space to curl up and read them in), a perfume bar, a flower shop and a café, all in an amazingly designed and inviting loft…

A couple of articles that we’ve picked up recently, which for us really highlight the power plays going in the mobile market and the need for networks to be crystal clear on how they are choosing to play competitively, both…

Very funny. Though not sure what’s so irritating about “hope that helps”.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/25ead124-f70e-11de-9fb5-00144feab49a.html?nclick_check=1…

Did you hear about Hotel Rafayel? It is London’s first sustainable luxury hotel.

http://www.hotelrafayel.com/…

Brilliant article from writer and ex-cricketer Ed Smith in the latest edition of Intelligent Life.

http://www.moreintelligentlife.com/content/ed-smith/are-we-too-professional…

“Measurement is another fetish of professionalism, as if something that cannot be measured isn’t quite real.”