Articles

How to deal with fear, to achieve sustainability in professional and personal life, was the theme of a webinar hosted by Initiatives of Change in Business and the Economy (ICBE) on 14 June. The keynote speaker was Dr Arpan Yagnik,

Amila Dilshan of the National Institute of Business Management, Sri Lanka, invited Mike Smith to address 100 students on the theme of Leading with Integrity, 29 March 2023.

Can ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance issues) deliver a sustainable and equitable global economy, asks business author Mark Goyder.

There is no 'silver bullet' to meet the world's energy demands, says energy supply expert Rick Westerdale. Instead, a variety of solutions is needed.

What does it mean to retire? When should we retire? How does one cope with retirement? And how do you live a fulfilling life in retirement?

How is the world going to feed 10 billion people? That was the question posed by Mexican impact investment professional and former Wall Street banker Rocio Cavazos when she addressed an online sustainability forum on 10 December.

Carbon dioxide and methane are the main greenhouse gases that accumulate in the atmosphere, leading to dangerous levels of global warming. The purpose of Earthbanc is to ‘enable the transition to a net zero [carbon emissions] world’, says its founding CEO Tom Duncan from Australia.

The London Business Literary Festival, held on 20 August 2021, invited business author Michael Smith to be on a panel to address an international webinar. 

A battery production business in a sub-Saharan African country was saved from closure, thanks to the intervention of a well-established NGO.

Suppose it might be possible to develop a 'vaccine' against human rights abuses in businesses around the world. 

Anti-corruption campaigners say that leadership and integrity are essential in tackling grand-scale corruption.

The world’s social media giants have, at last, confessed to the fact that they are not just platforms but publishers. They are responsible for the content they allow or do not allow, supplied by us the public as authors. Hence, for instance, their decision to ban Donald Trump from Twitter, because he inflamed insurrection. We as users are responsible for the content on social media. 

Mark Carney, one of the world’s leading economists and the former Governor of the Bank of England (2013-2020), said in his recent BBC Reith Lecture, 9 December that “financial values have come to dominate human values.” The result was that “values have suffered”.

Michael Smith was invited to represent Initiatives of Change during a two-day online forum on "Making Values Visible" run by Quakers and Business. He addressed the forum on 6 November 2020.

What do you make of the word duty? It’s not a word that immediately attracts or inspires me. It smacks of obligation, of having to do something that goes against the grain. Yet without it society would fall apart.

‘Small actions can make a disproportionate impact. You just won’t know, don’t know, till you try.’ So asserts Margaret Heffernan in her compelling new book. She poses two questions: ‘What do we need to do? And what do we need to be?’ The latter is as important as the former.

There may well be more spikes, more waves, in the Coronavirus pandemic. But what we do need are new spikes, new waves, of empathy and solidarity, integrity and compassion,

The Covid-19 pandemic has been a blessing in disguise for me in one respect: I’ve discovered the cornucopia of online streaming music. This has led to new discoveries.

I am painfully aware that I, as a white British male, come from a race of people who have been white supremacists in our history and too often still are today.

It is time for businesses to go beyond undertaking token Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programmes and focus on bigger issues such as how their businesses impact the environment and how they can incorporate measures to address climate change and global warming by taking in the interests of all stakeholders in the economy, journalist and author Michael Smith who writes extensively on topics of value in business and the economy said.

As a 24-year-old, Darren Hildrow was ‘a hedonist on a downward spiral of drink, drugs and sex. I would drink to forget things I had done while drinking and grew to loathe the person I had become.’ Now 42, and the Managing Director of the jewellery arm of an international fashion house, Darren puts his change of direction down to his friendship with Stanley Kiaer, businessman, mentor, father figure and friend to all those who passed through the doors of the Initiatives of Change centre in London.

Michael Smith, business author from the UK, addressed 70 MBA students and 70 computer engineering students, at the Chandigarh Group of Colleges (CGC), India, on 10 February. He was the guest in Chandigarh of Dr Ramandeep Saini, Head of International Relations and Associated Professor at the CGC Landran campus of 13,000 students, which was founded in 2001.

'Breivik is just a man. I wanted to face him. I wanted to understand him as a human being not just a violent extremist,' Bjørn Ihler, a survivor of the Anders Breivik terrorist attack of 2011, told a captivated audience at the Initiatives of Change centre in London on 1 November.

Surprise! Surprise! Those business organizations whose CEOs are character-driven outperform those organizations where the leaders are ‘self-focussed’ in their ambitions. It should be obvious, but it ain’t necessarily so. The ground-breaking thesis of this book is the research undertaken by Fred Kiel, and his team at the leadership development firm KRW International, which shows the clear link between character-driven leadership and performance.

When Nathalie Ormrod from Manchester attended a TIGERoadshow—a day’s event on Trust and Integrity in the Global Economy—at Liverpool Hope University, back in 2013, it was, she says, ‘a turning point’ for her: a lightbulb moment. Ormrod, who is Lecturer in Marketing at Manchester Metropolitan University, said she realised, there and then, that she needed to introduce the issue of ethical decision-making in business into her lecturers.

Latvia has enjoyed freedom from Soviet occupation for the last 25 years, short enough to be within living memory for older citizens, and long enough for a young generation to have grown up in political freedom. The country’s 500-kilometre boarder with Russian is only a three or four hour drive from the capital city. Twenty-six per cent of the population is Russian in this Baltic state.

Denmark is the world’s least corrupt country, according to the annual corruption perception index drawn up by the anti-bribery watchdog Transparency International. It is also one of the most environmentally aware nations. When 20 people met in the Initiatives of Change residential centre in Copenhagen on 28 May they looked at how to encourage the values that build trust in the economy.

Over 500 MBA students packed into a huge auditorium in Pune, India, to hear Michael Smith, Head of Business Programmes for Initiatives of Change in the UK and author of the book 'Great Company', speak about 'Pillars of trust and integrity' on 20 January. He was accompanied by Talia Smith from Initiatives of Change's Trust and Integrity in the Global Economy business programme, and Saurabh Gupta, Director of Communications for Initiatives of Change International, who is based in Pune. They were at the Sri Balaji Society, one of the industrial city's top MBA business schools.

Journalist and author Michael Smith urged the need for ‘conscience-based decision-making’ in banking, business and the economy when he launched his new book Great Company at the Caux Conference Centre in Switzerland, on 28 June. He was interviewed in front of conference participants by South African whistleblower Wendy Addison, whose story is one of many in the book, during the annual Caux conference on Trust and Integrity in the Global Economy (TIGE).

Mike Smith, Head of IofC-UK’s Business Programmes, chaired ‘Sustainable Inclusive Economic Development’, one of four breakout sessions on 6 April at the Healing History conference taking place in Richmond, Virginia. Panellists from Scotland, Mexico, the USA and England showcased and discussed models of best practice in grassroots and national economic development, affecting people's lives - and job opportunities - for the better.

The award-winning documentary film Beyond Forgiving, shot in post-Apartheid South Africa, is 'hugely humbling and stirring', said Julia Deakin, poet and lecturer in English Literature at the University of Bradford in Yorkshire. She hosted an evening in Bradford, on 22 May, with the film's two protagonists, Letlapas Mphahlele and Ginn Fourie from Cape Town, attended by students at the university's Department of Peace Studies.

The Lord's Prayer, if taken seriously, has the power to shape our lives and create destinies.

The best regulations in the world will fail in banks if carried out in a culture of greed.

During a lifetime spent exploring and promoting the power of reconciliation and forgiveness following conflict and war, British journalist and author Michael Henderson has become known as an “optimistic realist”.

Never has a financial crisis focused so starkly on moral, ethical and even spiritual issues.

A conference on integrity in Caux, Switzerland, brings together business professionals, farmers and journalists seeking ethics.

How can enterprises better serve the wider community? David Erdal has a radical solution.

A ground-breaking agreement has been reached in the war against global corruption.

As Jose Maria Figueres, Managing Director of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, drives to his office in Geneva, he sees the cows grazing in the fields by the road. Each cow benefits from over US$2 a day in agricultural subsidies. The cows, he says, are better off than the world's 1.2 billion poorest people, who have to survive on less than $1 a day. Can big business and activists agree on fighting poverty?

Poor harvests in 2002 and 2003 left millions of people needing food assistance. Last year Zimbabwe's farmers planted only about a third of their usual fields and the World Food Programme has designated Zimbabwe as a "hunger emergency zone". Food will be a major issue during the presidential elections scheduled for next month. Yet small-scale farmers are not without hope. They are benefiting from "born again" sweet potato plants, developed by a team of Zimbabwean scientists. T

Five years after the Dayton peace agreement, Michael Smith visits the Bosnian capital Sarajevo to attend an international media forum

Sophia Swire gave up a high-flying career in the City of London for the sake of illiterate children in Asia.

Yusuf Al-Azhari spent six years in solitary confinement as a political prisoner. Now he is helping to bring Somalia's warlords together. 

As more marriages break up than ever before, children pay the price.