17.30 Sunday The Corporation gets premier at the National Film Theatre with chance to interview director after. A socila lawyer who exposes the global corporate identity as psychotic. Then its on at the Curzon mist of October. ( Our band 1, 2,3, 4)

Then comes the most marvellous volly of Anita Roddick books: Troubled Water will finish Coke's image off for ever unless it gets responible and the book exposing Sweatshops will make young people question again

Then there's the European Social Forum; how can we help the president of the World Bank's brave war on poverty launched yesterday. http://actionpeace.blogspot.com

It is time to go beyond image-making Leadership, and I am confident that even if no other cioty gets it this fast, London's got enough responsibility networks to make the zeroisation of Andersen look like childsplay compared with all those other false brand valuations out their of humanly worthless global brands

Come play the better way of doing brand leadership, which incidentally benefits every shareholder too apart from the rampany speculator

chris
PS Have you heard of the new species yet: The Timeless Blog posted by ..., 4:23 PM  permalink

Fascinating article in The Times today, sadly already sequestered behind paid registration, about WebFootballClub.com in France. Here's the SP.

The club is managed by fans via its website. Most fans don't go to games but watch online. Every one gets a vote and votes are weighted by track record in making effective choices (don't ask me to explain). There is a club coach, but "all he can do is shout at the team and determine substitutions during matches". Soon, even substitutions will be done by fans watching live webcasts. Fierce debates take place in online forums.

Result? The club went from the fifth division of the Caen district to the second, in back-to-back championship wins. And went undefeated last season.

And how about this for loyalty, all you frequent flier manipulators?

Corinne Teissier, a 26-year old primary school teacher, was amongst the supporters who could take credit for the triumph. She saw all the games on the internet and acquired enough points to join the most influential grade of decision-makers. "I know everything about the players, except those that have joined this season, but I will be watching them very carefully."

She goes on to a detailed discussion of the club's prospects.

I love the sound of this. Talk about engaging the passion of fans. And I've always felt sceptical of the manger-centric tone of much football analysis, all very much in the heroic leader model of the world. What could other brands and businesses learn from this?

Tangential PS. This great Times article makes me an ardent supporter of... The Guardian, which manages to succeed whilst making vast swathes of its content available free, with none of the hassle of The Times.

Co-blogged at johnniemoore.com
posted by Johnnie M, 10:26 AM  permalink

If recent history is our guide, 20 or more

Short reasoning: most use the same defective risk analysis as Andersen did

Longer reasoning available at our associated blog of the 10 Billion $ Mapmaker & Audit network. posted by ..., 8:09 AM  permalink

Imagine this.

You let content producers get on with their own authentic contexts.

Then (without blurring the borders between their content testimonies and commercialism you work out which adverts match -multiply value around) what the content producer's community is connecting, doing , communicating.

We now know that 30 billion dollars worth of advertising industry has evolved this way in the last 4 years. It is as David Weinberger (2004) reported the coming "End of The Broadcast Nation".. May all our gods be cheering such human spirit reawakening.

It will soon be time for the creative industry to vote whether it proposes that those who try to rule the world from farm street should retire to the cricket pitch which they were always more pasionate about than marketing's greatest evil of the last 20 years: the corporate brand valuation number. Bang! It is time that the world's favourite global brand lead us responsibily into reality-making rather than merely perception battles for our minds.

It neatly loops with the 1976 Economist survey & Romano Prodi-sponsored Coming Entrepreneurial revolutions, 1982 Intrepreneurial Now, and 1984 visions of the next 40 years of the greatest productivity and health opportunities for mankind. It requires economics to be the servant of societies as well as vice versa. It requires the unfair and untrue numbers of globalization accountants & fear-compounding world trade speculators to 'go to jail & do not pass go until" their monopoly is transparently replaced by integrating open MAP!s making the future connected as much as they have obseesed with ring fencing the past as separate (an impoverishing mathematical game to play in a networked world if you put anything but grey into your leaders' brain cells) And its ideology is alive in the Q&A here ( Global University, Journalists for Humanity) and its commercialisation of network business models is being investigated here.

Well isn't it just what Beyond Image-making needed to get real in time for enjoying the 21st C at every coordinate of our globe? Come MAP! or shortcut

posted by ..., 1:25 PM  permalink

After years campaigning to improve labelling standards on its products, and hoping other supplier would follow its lead, Co-operative Group has
given up on sluggish manufacturers and decided to go it alone.

It is imposing its own 'supra-labelling' over the top of manufacturer's labelling systems. By flagging high sugar and salt content to consumers through a simple traffic light scheme it aims to bypass the morass of partial, confusing or downright misleading labelling which exists at present.

It's a brave step and we applaud them.
This is great news for consumers and the first step towards retailers truly acting as consumer champions.

However, it is just the tip of the iceberg as far as consumer accountability is concerned.

To address the concerns of people like Friends of the Earth, organisations must adopt total value-chain transparency.

Instead of focusing on explaining on intrinsic product attributes (nutrition), retailers must start to consider extrinsic effects of a product: its effect on the environment; the labour practices of its suppliers, the biodegradability of its packaging...biodiversity labelling, energy labelling could all follow.

However, this point of purchase labelling is not actually necessary. All that is required is product transparency. Instead of intervening in education, get manufacturers to share their value-chain data directly with consumers. And then allow these consumers to demand the information they want.

This is no small task...as transparency pioneers ROMP have discovered. They have actually done it!
posted by Tim, 11:29 AM  permalink

Global University of Poverty bloggers ask if we can help them compile their alternative top 10 reading list for leaders connecting with the future posted by ..., 9:25 AM  permalink

On Monday, we put Lucire, the print edition of our web site, to bed. It's the first time—at least in the fashion sector—that anyone's tried taking a web magazine into print.
   Today, we sighted the proofs and we are pretty happy with it all.
   We tried to implement Beyond Branding principles in it. The brand is close to its customers. Our junior photographer was found lurking on one of our forums. We have volunteers as well as staff. Readers steer the direction of editorial. It will contribute, from January 2005, to Future Forests.
   Editorially, the coverage is global. Every country is treated as part of a global community, rather than isolated nations. The cover model is half-Dominican, half-Caucasian. The team is global, rather than concentrated in any one centre.
   Of course I'm still nervous. It's one of those "spend the money you saved for a rainy day" situations. Only thing is, it's not raining. But it is important.
   The world probably needs a magazine like this, but no amount of rear-view-mirror market research is going to say that for sure. What we do have is the knowledge in our book that says that this magazine might make it after all.
   On October 4, 2004, the night of the launch, we shall see.
posted by Jack Yan, 1:31 PM  permalink

Beyond Branding just happened.

Under the radarscreen of the media so far, the world of 'gloss & polish' branding just got eviscerated.

This week saw the shipping of the world's first transparent product and incidentally the world's first certified organic leather product.

Arguably it was also the world's first guaranteed terrorism-free leather [much leather manufactuer in the Middle East has Bin laden connections]

I've blogged this here.
posted by Tim, 3:16 PM  permalink

The net was always going to be most valuable where it connected the disconnected. No group of people have ever been more under-represented by globalisation powers than youth. Where do you go to read their stories?

America's greatest students abroad
Young people question why corrupt states were permitted to compound like topsy
Please post where you go to listen to youth's bravest and most human futures. posted by ..., 1:53 PM  permalink

11.00 yesterday evening in Dc I was watching Bush's convention speech meandering around the fact that even Bush is sick of too many lawyers bidding up the cost of everything - curbing malpractice claims of the kind that mean that some doctors have to pay 2 years of turnover in insurance before they can retire being one example. But mostly Bush wanted the American public to be oblivious to the way the world sees the USA. His final sentence: "To everything we know, there is a season - a time for sadness, a time for struggle, a time for rebuilding. And now we have reached a time for hope. This young century will be liberty's century."

Next click this which happened to be the first link newsfeeds directed me when I started my laptoip this morning:
http://www.winbackrespect.org/
A new report by the independent Pew Research Center has found that American voters are acutely worried about the loss of international respect for the US. For the first time since the Vietnam era, foreign policy and national security issues are dominating the presidential election. Two thirds of Americans believe that America is less respected in the world than in the past, and, by roughly two-to-one, see this loss of respect as a major problem for the country. Not surprisingly, a majority of Americans believe that winning back respect from our allies is a top priority for the nation. View full report

Short of a momentous event, my guess at America's split identity is that Bush will be re-elected, and the system will become more and more viciously the opposite of global liberty at every locality. Its the system disease of American politics I fear: dumbing down media, lowest common denominatotr character association of every viewpoint that actually needs integrating with your own not nuking, arms & debt races, lack of transparently valuing human beings in the work place, such insularity that world news seldom gets attention other than when the Britney Spears of American celebrity go abroad. I dont think that even George realises how trapped he is in the system. I wonder what sort of president he might have made if no american president ever needed big business's money to even get a voice in US elections instead of he who's most beholden to the power of the biggest monetised organisations the world has known being the most likely president.

The bigger a system the more tense conflicts it needs to openly audit and iteratively resolve. The American nation is the world's biggest human system and it is making all its people ill or out of touch with most of the human race (depressed, narcisstic, me-me-me not community-community, not knowing from 1st grade up why money is different from every other dynamic of human value, blinded by lawyers and other professionals from seeing who has more than plenty and who could do so much more if given the right helping hand to start making the most of their life-time).

I love the spirit of American people wherever this can be seen through a 20th century's most glorious moments for humanity -I even have high regard for the personal level courage of both Bush and Kerry in their lifetime's truest human moments (not that the mass media would ever wish to explain what those were head to head). I see no human value whatsoever in the system diseases that being nationally organised in such a way as to image-make liberty for all 6 billion human beings whilst to reality-make -and compound - the opposite.

According to one poll of experts in global identities, the value of America in the rest of the world's eyes has gone down by over a third since the beginning of the millennium- the fastest devaluation in history. More worringly for the western notion of democracy: it is predicted to continue to plummet whichever Republica or Democrat takes office at the end of the year. With the election system and power dynamics now ruling America, the differences between electable president whether Democrat or Republican are small. And the one thing the system ensures is that the next president wont be able to change the system whatever he (and it is always he in US history so much so that feminist movements get obsessed with small things not the big picture of equal rule- imagine if half of the presiodents of the last 50 years had been women - would we be leading somewhere wholly different? you bet!) most passionately believes in. Only the whole interconnecting world of people can help America change, and that means a world that looks at big issues from every grassroots context in every way that traditional soundbiting politicians cannot begin to feel or know - start with helping us compile 30000 active ideas on Global Poverty. (1,2)

If you have read this, why not cut and post it to a friend. I dont mind if you think I am completely wrong. I do mind if we dont use the internet now to ask : are we steering humanity at every coordinate around the world the way that could make the most of all our lifetimes rather than compounding the way that will make the least of most of our children's. This could be the greatest half century to co-create all kinds of human value; the net gives us such collective social liberties and trustworthy relationships anchored around deep human contexts; will we the people identify, communicate and practice reality-making in time?
posted by ..., 11:51 AM  permalink