Alexander Citizens : Why the Key to Fixing Everything is All of Us

Why the Key to Fixing Everything is All of Us
1. Auflage 2022
ISBN: 978-1-912454-85-3
Verlag: Canbury Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 320 Seiten

MCKINSEY TOP 5 RECOMMENDED READ 'An underground hit' - Best Politics Books, Financial Times 'Jon has one of the few big ideas that's easily applied' - Sam Conniff, Be More Pirate 'A wonderful guide to how to be human in the 21st Century' - Ece Temelkuran, How to Lose a Country: the Seven Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship Description Citizens opens up a new way of understanding ourselves and shows us what we must do to survive and thrive as individuals, organisations, and nations. Over the past decade, Jon Alexander's consultancy, the New Citizenship Project, has helped revitalise some of Britain's biggest organisations including the Co-op, the Guardian and the National Trust. Here, with the New York Times bestselling writer Ariane Conrad, he shows how history is about to enter age of the Citizen. Because when our institutions treat people as creative, empowered creatures rather than consumers, everything changes. Unleashing the power of everyone equips us to face the challenges of economic insecurity, climate crisis, public health threats, and polarisation.  Citizens is an upbeat handbook, full of insights, clear examples to follow, and inspiring case studies, from the slums of Kenya to the backstreets of Birmingham - and a foreword by Brian Eno. It is the perfect pick-me-up for leaders, founders, elected officials - and citizens everywhere. Organise and seize the future! Reviews 'Society is like an out of control house party - eating, drinking and consuming everything. Jon is the organiser of the campfire gathering behind the party. It's calm and welcoming and you won't want to leave. In Citizens, Jon and Ariane show how to leave the burning house of the Consumer Story and join the campfire that is the Citizen Story.' - Stephen Greene, CEO of RockCorps and founding Chair of National Citizen Service UK 'The belief that every single one of us has both the potential and the desire to make the world better drives me every day, in everything I do. In Citizens, Jon shows how taking that belief as a starting point really could transform our world. This is a truly powerful book, in every sense of the word.' - Josh Babarinde, Forbes 30 Under 30 Social Entrepreneur 'Every great transformation requires a new story. A story that reveals new possibilities and points toward an optimistic alternative to the current situation. Citizens presents just such a story.' - Tim Brown, Chair of IDEO and author of Change By Design 'The shift from consumer to citizen is a truly big idea. If you're in a position of strategic influence, I strongly recommend you engage with this and consciously explore what it might mean for your organisation.' - Dame Fiona Reynolds DBE, Former Director General, National Trust, and Trustee, BBC 'There is such a thing as an idea whose time has come. This is that idea.' - James Perry, Board Member, B Lab Global, and Founding Partner, Snowball Investment Management About the Authors JON ALEXANDER began his career with success in advertising, winning the prestigious Big Creative Idea of the Year before making a dramatic change. Driven by a deep need to understand the impact on society of 3,000 commercial messages a day, he gathered three Masters degrees, exploring consumerism and its alternatives from every angle. In 2014, he co-founded the New Citizenship Project to bring the resulting ideas into contact with reality. In Citizens, he is ready to share them with the world.  ARIANE CONRAD has built a career turning big ideas into books that change the world. Known as the Book Doula, she has co-written several New York Times bestsellers. BRIAN ENO is an artist, philosopher and Citizen who has played a critical part in British culture since the early 1970s.

JON ALEXANDER began his career with success in advertising, winning the prestigious Big Creative Idea of the Year before making a dramatic change. Driven by a deep need to understand the impact on society of 3,000 commercial messages a day, he gathered three Masters degrees, exploring consumerism and its alternatives from every angle. In 2014, he co-founded the New Citizenship Project to bring the resulting ideas into contact with reality. In Citizens, he is ready to share them with the world.   ARIANE CONRAD has built a career turning big ideas into books that change the world. Known as the Book Doula, she has co-written several New York Times bestsellers.   BRIAN ENO is an artist, philosopher and Citizen who has played a critical part in British culture since the early 1970s. He is a deep believer in the power of ideas and the possibility of a better world, beliefs which manifest both in his audio and visual art, and in his deep engagement with social, political and environmental issues.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Alexander, Jon

Leseproben

OPENING
This book reveals what is quite possibly the only thing that can save us now: the Citizen inside every one of us. Which is to say: there is still hope. The future is up for grabs. In order to survive and thrive, we must step into the Citizen Story. We must see ourselves as Citizens – people who actively shape the world around us, who cultivate meaningful connections to their community and institutions, who can imagine a different and better life, who care and take responsibility, and who create opportunities for others to do the same. Crucially, our institutions must also see people as Citizens, and treat us as such. When they do, everything changes. If we can step into the Citizen Story, if we can transform our institutions, we will be able to face our myriad challenges: economic insecurity, ecological emergency, public health threats, political polarisation, and more. We will be able to build a future. We will be able to have a future. That is what is at stake here. The Citizen Story is already present, just beneath the surface of our society. It has been taking shape in the national and regional politics of Taiwan, Ireland, Iceland, Belgium, and beyond, where governments are embracing a role that is more about coordination and facilitation than central command. It’s been emerging in Barking and Birmingham; Paris in France and Porto Allegre in Brazil; Calgary in Canada; and little Frome in Somerset, where mayors and local politicians of contrasting ideology, age and skin colour have been tapping into the energy and ideas of their people to resuscitate their cities and towns. It’s been building in refugee camps and shanty towns, in big charities and social movements, in museums, in schools, and even in businesses, as all sorts of organisations and institutions find success through involving, rather than telling or selling. People everywhere are joining in, and creating the possibility of a truly sustainable, inclusive, joyful future as they do so. All this is happening. But so far, it is a long way from enough. As things stand, too many of us are not engaging in the world around us. We have – understandably – lost faith in our institutions, most especially our governments, and so we keep our focus close, strive to get our own needs met in a world that seems to be growing harsher and less safe by the day. We are living inside what I call the Consumer Story, which tells us we are entitled and passive: we are to be sold to and served. The challenge is not that the Citizen Story is complicated to articulate or difficult to evidence; it is simple, rooted in deep truth, and emerging everywhere. But it is hidden by the dominance of the Consumer Story. The organisations and institutions of our society – not just our businesses but our governments too, and every other sector – reinforce this story over and over again, every single day. They have done so to the extent that it is often mistaken for fundamental human nature. The Consumer Story has come to feel inevitable, unbreakable. But it is not the true story of humanity; it is simply the story of self and society that most of us – almost all of us – have been brought up within. I am no exception. Having spent the first decade of my career in London’s advertising industry, I’m more like the rule. LEAVING ADLAND
I started my working life at 151 Marylebone Road in London, the offices of Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO. It was Thursday 25th September 2003 and I was 21. Standing before the doors of AMV – considered one of the world’s most prestigious and successful architects of human aspiration and behaviour, much lauded for its power in making brands into household names – I was not only seeking my fortune but ready to make what I then understood as my contribution. Advertising was a dream job in the world of that time, the only world I’d ever really known. I was two years old when the big consumer superbrands arrived, when in the single symbolic year of 1984, Apple launched the Macintosh, Nike sold the first Air Jordans, and Virgin Atlantic broke open the skies. I was 15 when Tony Blair and New Labour heralded Cool Britannia, told us things could only get better, and were very comfortable with people getting filthy rich. And I was 19 and at university when, two years and two weeks before my first day at AMV, the twin towers of the World Trade Center came crashing down. In the wake of 9/11, George W Bush, the US President, Blair, the British Prime Minister and the rest told us that what we the people could do – what we should do – was buy stuff. Keeping the growth of the economy going was how we could show those who aimed to terrorise us that we were not afraid. We would keep calm and carry on shopping. And I would help. My first boss at AMV had bought the story in a big way. He gave me a copy of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History, the widely influential book that declared that humanity had reached its zenith in liberal capitalist democracy. My boss interpreted the book as meaning that advertising was the cutting edge of the only future going. And he defined my new job as a Graduate Account Manager like this: ‘The average consumer sees somewhere between 1,500 and 3,000 commercial messages a day. We have to cut through that. Our job is to make our clients’ messages the ones that stick.’ At first, I took this task at face value, aimed for excellence within the rules of the game, and often succeeded. Both AMV and the next agency I worked for won Agency of the Year while I was there. One year, one of my projects even won Brand Republic’s Big Creative Idea of the Year. But while I played the game, I felt uncomfortable almost from the beginning. It was partly the day-to-day: for all that I’m still close to many of my former colleagues, there were others who did things in their personal lives that I wanted no part of (think Mad Men and more). It was partly my belated but growing political awareness. I read No Logo, Naomi Klein’s deconstruction of my industry: according to her, the principal impact of my long hours of work was to equate products with lifestyles and with identity, leveraging ‘cool’ and youthfulness and desirability, and to help corporations obscure the suffering those products caused to workers and the environment. I watched Adam Curtis’s classic documentary series The Century of the Self, and learned how, using the psychology behind desires and aspirations, Sigmund Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays and the field of public relations professionals he had inspired had not just increased their clients’ sales; they had shaped the course of 20th Century politics. Viewing politics as just another product to be sold to the public, they had advised numerous administrations, to the extent not just of shaping electoral campaigns but even launching wars. The year I entered the workplace was the same year that Bush and Blair led the invasion of Iraq, bringing more than a million people out onto the streets of London in protest. I could only look the other way for so long. Mostly, though, it was the climate. This was the one I couldn’t hold alongside my work, the arena where the clash was too obvious and too direct. Doing a good job meant selling more stuff, yet ever-increasing consumption was obviously unsustainable. For a while I accepted the lullaby of ‘conscious consumption,’ and did my best to sell greener stuff: Eurostar instead of flying, fairtrade chocolate, and so on. This even, briefly, made my choice of career feel good again: where better to work than in advertising, if what we needed to do was modify the nature of consumption? But my relief was fleeting, not least because for every pound spent promoting the ethical or environmental alternative, even just within the walls of the agency I was working at, another five or ten or even 20 were at the same time pushing the opposite. Around this time, the words of my first boss began to haunt me. A question took shape in my mind: What are we doing to ourselves when we tell ourselves we’re Consumers 3,000 times a day? What if the impact wasn’t just about the stuff we were consuming, and the material impacts of that (as important as those things are), but something much more pervasive? What my advertising work was part of, I began to see, was the telling – and retelling and retelling, thousands of times a day – of a story about who we are and what we’re capable of. A story that creates not only material but also psychological and even spiritual problems, and at the same time limits what we believe ourselves to be capable of doing in response to those problems. The Consumer Story, as I would come to think of it. This story is morally justified by a vague theory that every one of us pursuing our own self interest will add up to collective interest. It is a story in which human society is essentially and necessarily a competition, since we lazy, selfish humans can be driven to act only by the competitive imperative, which arises from primal instincts to protect and pass on to our own. The institution in this story functions above all to serve us. We feel entitled, and believe ourselves self-reliant and independent, the creators of our own destiny. Because...