Professor of Sustainability Leadership at the Institute for Leadership and Sustainability and visiting professor with shared oversight of leadership research and teaching at Warsaw University School of Social Sciences (with Prof. Wlodimiertz Swiatek).

For 40 years I have combined university teaching with consulting – advising organisations of every kind and size on matters of sustainability and organisation development. They include Singapore Civil Service, to which I was a retained advisor; Goldman Sachs Japan, where I advised on sustainable and socially responsible investing; the Japanese government, supporting a national campaign to improve Japan’s Global Gender Gap ranking; the National Council of Voluntary Organisations; Swiss Re, on emerging global risk and Grasmere Village Hall Committee. I should add that the last of those was by far the most taxing, personally and professionally.

I have served on several parliamentary and other panels and have held several trusteeships.

Some 40 papers and chapters published, many with co-author Jem Bendell; some others, between 1995 and 2012, under a pseudonym.

In 2000, with Kate Rawles, Chris Loynes and Richard Lemmey, I created a postgraduate course in developmental education at the Universityof Cumbria (then University College of St Martin). Shortly afterwards, we founded the Centre for Leadership and Sustainability in Ambleside. Later, we were joined by Jem Bendell and David Murphy. CLS became IFLAS, which has become a model for similar initiatives.

I lived in Japan between 1985 and 1991. We keep a house there and go back whenever we can. I am a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and a Chartered Fellow of the CIPD. My tendency to scepticism, especially about leadership, began when I was expelled from school, a career high point not since surpassed.

My professional life was conducted in time reluctantly stolen from Alpine mountaineering. I should add that it surprises me, given how much climbing I have done, how rubbish I still am at it.

Changing business education

As a consultant, an independent activist, scholar and writer, I am driven by what I see as the imperative need for change in the nature and purpose of business education. I believe that, by and large, business corporations, under the prevailing neoliberal sentiment, have come to regard social and environmental responsibilities, and even morality, as mere options, usually taking second place to rent-seeking and profit.

The business system has, since 2008 preferred to sequester profits as dead money rather than invest in socially useful innovation; much of such innovation as does occur is intended to reduce business costs through automation or to increase rents through data appropriation and corporate enclosures. The results include regulatory arbitrage, gross invasions of privacy, the erosion of civil solidarity and egregious inequality. Mainstream business education is attuned to this terrifying ideological capture while mainstream economics cultivates the dead letters of market fundamentalism and homo economicus. I propose that, just as there is an urgent need to reform economics education, so there is a present need to transform the bulk-mainstream of business education, introducing critical-scholarly and activist perspectives under the broad heading of business-for-sustainable-futures.

The spearhead of this change is leadership: a revolution in how it is understood that starts with the rejection of hero-worship and masculine conceptions of power.