Business leaders as the new industrialists

On this week’s podcast, I spoke to Hilary Cottam, a social entrepreneur and activist whose work is endlessly fascinating. She wrote Radical Help, a book about how we change our welfare state, based on her fieldwork with communities across Britain and the world in designing alternative ways to access social institutions. The big questions is also: how do business leaders engage with the radical change?

Below are some key parts of our conversation. 

You can listen to our conversation in full here or wherever you get podcasts. 

Lots of people, regardless of their age, their level of education, their position are not necessarily excited by the prospect of change and it can make them feel quite uneasy.

Hilary Cottam: "Well, that's really interesting because I'm currently running ethnographic workshops with workers in the UK. So two weeks ago, I was in East Ayrshire, which is on the west coast of Scotland, former deep mining communities, extreme poverty. Villages where there's no broadband and it costs ￡6.50 to take a bus to the post office, to the nearest shop – governments of all persuasions have left these communities behind. I was running workshops in this context with people who are gravediggers, who are doing minimum wage care work, and I'm asking them about what a good working life looks like.

They are absolutely clear that technology is coming and they are absolutely clear about how they want to redesign their lives. This goes back to the fact that people are simply not asked, and there is no way of channelling those views."

In the same way that the last transition was driven by Henry Ford and the automotive industry and mass manufacturing, and then all the things that built up around it, we have new industrialists today. How well do they recognize their formative role in the design of the world we're moving into?

Hilary Cottam: "What I'm trying to do is create a category that is not every industrialist and to say: how would you feel about taking on this mantle? What defines that mantle to me is that you are interested in a search for new social systems that do three things: 1) They help people with these transitions, 2) They create the possibility for everybody to have a better life, 3)They enable the full deployment of technology.

So what we're seeing at the moment is patterns of philanthropy. I'm not interested in philanthropy. While I'm not saying that it's not good, I'm interested in what is a new settlement between how we organize capitalism that enables people to thrive, enables technology to be deployed, so we create more wealth and enables that to be shared in a different way. So it works on both sides of the equation and it's clear that on both sides we need a rethinking.

I've got a manifesto for a fifth social revolution. At the core of that manifesto is a rethinking of what the modern human is. So the old human is Homo Economicus, the rational maximizer, and you are assuming that every CEO is that person. The new human is the Sapiens Integra that understands that we need to grow over many dimensions, that we need to connect to one and each other to grow."

Listen to my discussion with Hilary Cottam here, or wherever you get podcasts.