Common Purpose Blog

Economic instability has presented businesses with many challenges since the great crash of 2008 – and these problems have refused to disappear. It is amid these harsh financial realities that the perception of learning and development (L&D) has changed. A recent survey by the Henley Business School suggested that L&D has become increasingly focused as organisations look [...]

This week’s youth unemployment statistics – nearly 1 million young people in the UK out of work – are sad and disappointing, but unfortunately not surprising! At Common Purpose, because we work with people across the UK and beyond, both employers and the unemployed, I have been hearing since the start of the year that [...]

Common Purpose is currently in its 21st year, in which time we have met and engaged with so many leaders all over the world. In celebration of this, over the coming weeks we will be featuring blogs from 21 guest writers – a group of people who represent the diverse nature of the leaders we [...]

Today, we are living in a world that’s about taking short-term decisions: CEOs who pray to at the altar of the devil called quarterly earnings, companies that react to rivals, politicians who are only worried about the coming election cycle and leaders who are in for the near-term gain. And then there are Steve and [...]

I met a 22 year old in Edinburgh recently who has just finished her nursing qualifications, she is eager to get going with her career, make her contribution to society and use her knowledge and skills but there are so few jobs coming up that the competition is fierce – it’s no better if she [...]

As a serial entrepreneur, Julia Middleton posed this question to me and requested that I write this blog post. At first, it sounded like an easy assignment…but once you drill down into it, it certainly gets the grey matter working! At the outset, I completely buy into the “serve to lead model” concept (incidentally the [...]

The following is a guest blog from Natalie Cooper, Editor at Changeboard, as part of Common Purpose’s 21st birthday 21 blogs. Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is a term that’s been thrown around for a few years. Some leaders get it. The majority don’t. Yet the economy is crying out for a new era of ethical [...]

Common Purpose is currently in its 21st year, in which time we have met and engaged with so many leaders all over the world. In celebration of this, over the coming weeks we will be featuring blogs from 21 guest writers – a group of people who represent the diverse nature of the leaders we [...]

The following is a guest post from Rosie Walford, a participant on the 2011 Dishaa event in Pune, India, sharing her experience from Day 1 of the course. Stay posted for further updates each day. We were a bunch of strangers from very mixed backgrounds and we were still being very polite on our first [...]

The following is a guest blog from Amy Ritman, Senior Course Director at Common Purpose, working on the Dishaa UK-India leaders course. William Hague’s speech this week at the Asian Financial Forum in Hong Kong resonated with our experience of putting together our new initiative called Dishaa. In his speech, Hague stresses the importance of [...]