Thoughts on viewing people as “citizens” rather than “consumers”.
“What is it we are trying to do to in the world that is so big that we need others to help us do it?”
Jon Alexander
This week’s #WhatComesNextLive guest was Jon Alexander, author of the soon to be released book “Citizens” (order your pre-release copy here)
It was a privilege to read a pre-release copy of Citizens prior to my podcast interview with Jon.
So much of it resonated with me, including the importance of understanding what made the “Consumer” story so enticing for us as an alternative to the “Subject” story. Only when we understand that history can we then look to the future and the shift from the Consumer story to the Citizen one.
Once we set the frame for Jon’s thinking around Citizenship as a practice, my thoughts and questions were particularly focused in our conversation on how the #CitizenShift can apply to larger businesses around the world to help them with “Leading from Purpose” and to scale their impact around Purpose+People+Planet being the drivers to making Profit, as opposed to Profit being the driver.
At the heart of this for me, then, was to consider how companies and their leaders can adopt Citizenship “as a practice”, modelling the behavioural shifts away from the “Consumer” story as per the grid at the top of this post.
My own core work is with purpose-led leaders seeking to have that kind of positive impact for society and the world, whilst pragmatically recognising the models of the world we live in, with the need to make profits for shareholders. I see, over and over, where such businesses focus on being Caring+Creative+Collaborative, three core attributes of the practice of Citizenship that Jon came back to repeatedly.
However, my major lightbulb moment was when Jon took that out beyond the organisations themselves. Yes, it is is key to move away from the “King” and “Subject” model of the “omnipotent CEO” to a collaborative business with empowered people at all levels, but this still keeps it within the business.
To repeat Jon’s phrase from the top of this post:
“What is it we are trying to do to in the world that is so big that we need others to help us do it?”
That’s it. That’s what the Citizenship story means for business. When businesses can truly go out beyond themselves and their people and talk to the world outside, treating those people not as “Consumers” but as fellow “Citizens”, when we have that we have a really different world of “business as a force for good”.
Thank you to Jon for the inspiration, I am now going to take out this question and ask it widely, starting today!