1. Leslie Dighton, Trustee for the Foundation of the Common Good, examines how leading for the common good can expand and enrich our thinking for the benefit of us all

In this launch episode, series host, Elaine Herdman-Barker, Chair of Global Leadership Associates and Partner for Mutual Growth and the search for the Common Good chats to Leslie Dighton, Trustee for the Foundation of the Common Good, Founder of the Chairman’s Club & Governor of the LSE. Together they examine how leading for the common good can expand and enrich our thinking for the benefit of us all. Read our accompanying article to this episode here.

These are the words and views of Leslie Dighton.  To find out more about the Common Good Foundation and some of the books Leslie has written including 'The Little Black Book of the Common Good', please visit their website here. 

Thank you for listening. 

Transcript

Welcome to the Leading for Good Podcast. I'm Elaine Herdman-Barker, Co-Founder of Global Leadership Associates. In this series, we'll be talking with special guests who are transforming leadership. We'll be asking leaders how they tip the world towards the good? Learning about ways we can stretch our thinking, and discovering so much more about a leader's footprint. With strategic thinkers from all over the world, we'll investigate just what Leading for Good means today.

Leslie Dighton, you're a Trustee of the Foundation for the Common Good, and amongst your many other hats, Founder of the Chairmans Club, Governor of the LSE, and you've written a series of papers tackling the matter of the common good. And I say 'tackle', because you really get stuck into what we all need to commit ourselves to, if we are to live well together - people and planet. What should we make of the common good? How would you sum it up?

Well, Elaine, that's a small question, but with a very large answer potentially hanging around it. If you look back in time, for 2,000 years and more, the common good has been a concept that philosophers, since Plato, have thought about and talked about, and debated. And in terms of the aggregate idea of politics and economics, it's always meant a balance and harmony in society, between fundamentally three forces: the forces of state, state governments; the forces of markets; and the forces of civil society. And the first two, state and markets, kind of squeeze each other together like bellows, over time, and one dominates and then the other recedes a bit, but they're always both there. And, in a sense, you can't imagine a society without both the government and markets functioning in it. Civil society is the one that used to be extremely powerful and important, but has got squeezed and eroded, almost permanently, by the other two. So civil institutions like building societies, communities, parishes, universities, professions, audit, accounting, the boards of companies, care homes, insurance-friendly societies. They've all got less autonomy now, and less authority than they used to have, squeezed by markets and governments. So the notion of the common good is to restore that balance in society more effectively, not just in institutional terms, but in terms of values as well.

Do you think the common good, Leslie, is a universally helpful term to work with? I wonder if, for some, and I've had some feedback, it can be a bit obscure, smack to some of radicalism and does this matter? Could it be a hindrance to working with this further?

Words obviously are important. Common good is not the same as public good. Public good tends to be associated with an ideology of the left. Private good tends to be associated with an ideology of the right. And the common good risks alienation, as a result of being associated with either of those. It's not that, it's not a political creed in any sense at all. It's an area which embraces both the public goods of the left, and the private goods of the right, of markets and of governments. But it also embraces a universal body of values and characteristics, which I believe it expresses extremely well when it talks about the common goods of the common good, broadly conceived.

And you mentioned values a couple of times, and it's absolutely central, Leslie. Could you say a little bit more about that? What is it you're talking about and working with, when you raise the question of values?

Well, a way of looking at those is with a snapshot that Covid has given us, in that period since Covid struck, a whole range of people have come to realise that certain critical things are very important, that previously we had become slightly blind. We were in the full process of globalisation, and we've realised very clearly now that just-in-time economic models, for example, and lowest cost models do not have any resilience at all, and they're immensely fragile. We recognise that cooperation is absolutely critical between humankind of all sorts, nations, individuals, businesses and markets, whereas we operate primarily on a competitive basis, rather than a cooperative one. And that produces a win-win mentality, which is a value in itself, as opposed to a win-lose mentality, which characterises competitive characteristics, and not leaving anything on the table for the other party. Another value tends to be around the long term versus immediate gratification. So the common good sees leadership as being a long-term trusteeship, rather than something that is measured and motivated towards the immediacy of gain, and advantage. It's more concerned with the effectiveness of the whole, rather than simply the efficiency of a piece, and that demands a completely different mentality and skillset, to embrace the holistic picture of an organisation, or a society.

So the second big thing, big virtue or value of common good, and currently it's the biggest of all, is that nature has been commoditised by the economic and state model that we've operated to; it has become a commodity for use, just like any other factored cost. And, of course, as a result of that, it's turned immensely angry. We live now on a very hot and angry planet, and nature is beginning a fight back, or to express itself in ways that are potentially catastrophic for civilisation. So nature is a huge part of the concept of the common good. I think that nest of values through nature, labour as a vocation, intergenerational care, effectiveness rather than efficiency, cooperation and mutuality rather than competition, those are the key values, I think, that are contained within the idea of common good.

Picking up on that, Leslie, I've heard you - you mentioned earlier on state and markets. In the past, I've also heard you refer to the holders of the global mandate, in that, from memory, you've spoke of the realms of politics, business and faith organisations, and the role that they have to play in, perhaps, we could say, helping us have more permission to think and act differently, to address the concerns that you've raised. We need, you've said, the engagement of these three realms for us to think and work differently, for the common good. Are you getting that engagement? Can you see that engagement building?

No. I think we're coming out of a period of roughly 40 years of excessive individualisation of our value frames, on the back of Big Bang in the city, and the constant thrust to privatise on the one hand, and centralise on the other. So the result of that is that both the institutions and the associated values have themselves lost traction, lost power, lost authority. And it does behove every institution, in my view, to repurpose, rethink, reframe its mandate within the world, which is both upon us and increasingly in the pipeline. And that world is going to be very different from the period that we've just been through, particularly, as I say, on the front of nature and the way in which humankind needs, as a whole, to partner in its attempt to redress, and take back control of global warming and create the conditions of society that allow all the other common goods, and public goods and private goods to flourish. That's going to require an extraordinary act of leadership on the part of a very large number of people, political and economic leaders in the first place, to really take onboard the idea that there is a new covenant that mankind needs to strike with nature, compared with the combative and reductionist one that it's currently in. Repurposing of mandates by all the critical institutions that support society, and through which society operates and works, from the church, to universities, to corporate boards, to professional organisations. All need to reassess what it is they're trying to do in life, what their purpose is, and how they can best organise themselves and behave, and what values they should adhere to, to address that repurposed and reframed world.

So it's not just leaders in that sense, because all the leaders, both of institutions and political entities, are actually individuals, at the end of the day. So everybody being an individual, it behoves every single individual to rethink the framework of how they are, what their purpose in life is, and how they can contribute to the condition of society in which they currently belong. And one of the ideas that we had a moment to talk about recently, but not very much, is this idea that every individual is born with a private purse, individual to them of private common goods, and that purse is filled for everybody in exactly the same way, with tokens of respect and mutuality, and cooperation and love, and caring and duty, and welcome and support. And it's how we play those cards, each of us, every day in our daily lives, that will actually create an accumulative base of acceptance for a revitalised common good, within which institutions and political leaders can exercise the overarching policy reforms, and reframing that needs to take place. So the private purse is the most wonderful thing, because it's unfathomable, it's bottomless, it's capable of endless use. It costs absolutely nothing, and it is extraordinarily beautiful in its ability to accumulate good and good will, and good behaviour.

And, Leslie, I have a final question. It links very closely to what you were saying there, and it's rooted in what we can look forward to in the years to come from leaders. How can we not be fooled by our smartness, by our reliance on intellectualisation of problems, but to actually build on something that you've also mentioned, which is this different pulse of human sensitivity to other humans and planets, to the warmth? Less, dare I say it, cold-heartedness in leadership and more compassion, humility. And you used two words earlier, more ignorance and curiosity. Can we look forward to that?

We certainly can, as far as I'm concerned. I prize, and have great quantities of both ignorance and curiosity. Whether you can sell other people on the virtues and values of having greater capacity in those two areas, I don't know, but I do think they're incredibly important. I think, at the end of the day, it is a turning point in values, and people need their own private epiphanies, and epiphanies come in all kinds of shapes and forms, and from all different kinds of directions. The type that we want to move away from, is the exercise of authority in a command and control mode, characterised very strongly by leaders who looked as though they were succeeding wonderfully for a period, but have produced the most terrible consequences in their aftermath. And Microsoft, under a new leader, has, and has, by exercising ignorance and curiosity, and encouraging people to reach across boundaries to each other, has become infinitely creative. And the net fruit of that has been a sevenfold increase in the financial value of Microsoft in the last seven years, which is an extraordinary tribute to the interconnection between the leadership mode, and the financial output. The other thing that we've got to do is not just have epiphanies, but we've got to denude leadership of its unfortunate, ideological content. Running a business doesn't necessarily mean that you have to be a screaming right-wing market fanatic. There was a time 20, 30 years ago, before Big Bang, when leaders considered, as a board and as a chairman, their duty was to the legacy that they left behind. And it had to be an enhanced quality, compared with what they found when they took over.

And that enhanced legacy was not just the balance sheet and the profit and loss account, but the quality of the human capital, the quality of innovation, the quality of the spirit, the quality of caring and loving in that entity of people. And above all, its resilience, its ability to stand up to shocks that aren't analytically foreseeable. So a measure of not laxness, but flexibility in the way in which resources are analysed, a measure of discretion to how people actually work and operate. So leadership is not a proprietary thing, into which one can thrust an ideological preference. Leadership is about the husbanding of resources, some of them outstanding and some of them quite ordinary, into the best possible combination of talent over time, that produces the security and wellbeing, and development of everybody associated with the firm. Not just those that work in it, but suppliers into that process, customers, shareholders, and, of course, society, as a whole. And that last bit is absolutely critical to the common good, because community and community relationships are the one big area that firms are still fairly pathetic, in the round, at thinking through and owning as part of their contribution to the wellbeing of society, as a whole.

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Thanks for joining us for our first episode. Take a look at our show notes for more links and information. And be sure to join us next time, when I chat to Andy Samuel, CEO of the North Sea Transition Authority. Until then, goodbye!