The Knackered Horse, The Dead Cat, and the Hospice.

Letting go of the old

I listened to Rishi Sunak’s speech today with a curious mixture of compassion and sadness. Right now, his job is a miserable one to have. His pledges are sound, but I’m not sure any of us believe he can deliver when he has a badly fractured party at his back, a wounded public sector at his front, and is surrounded by an unrepentant and toxic business culture.

We need a new approach couched in the language of “we”, not “I”, that brings people together. It’s hard. It’s serious conflict management.

Here’s my take on why.

The Knackered Horse

Pardeep Bhakar. Unsplash

Henry Ford is reputed to have said that if he’d given people what they were asking for, he’d have developed a faster horse. His insight and courage in being a maverick gave us the first affordable car and a workforce paid well enough to afford what they made. It made Ford a fortune and set the tone for the next hundred years of production.

Recognising that incremental improvement of what we accepted has limits was, I think, at the…