One young man came to tell me about a conference he had been to recently. To quote him directly, “there were so many rules on access that there remained almost nothing left to be accessed.”

They asked me masses of questions. Good ones, real ones, which you could not answer with one sound bite. In fact every answer I gave was untidy, especially the ones about prejudice. But I hope they were real answers that reflect real leadership, which is such a balancing act with very few absolutes.

I learnt leadership, young and early. Not everyone is as lucky as I was but even if it’s not great, they are learning it.

So how are we going to ensure that the young people who are out of work in vast numbers in the UK get some of this important learning? Young people who are trying their level best to get work but failing who will be the leaders of the future but will miss out on some crucial years of learning.

Common Purpose can’t get people into jobs. But we can run our courses; courses which many employers pay fees for their young talent to attend; for the generation that might go without. So we’ve launched the Young Million campaign

A short time ago one of the Common Purpose trustees stopped us all in our conversation about the Common Purpose brand by telling us – weaving in a story from a dinner the previous night which we had all attended – how to think about and live a real, honest, deeply rooted brand and a set of values around it.

As he spoke we all shut up and listened. We heard the bell like quality of his logic, the simplicity of his words and when he finished we all spontaneously applauded.

His story about the restaurant went like this:

We went to a lovely restaurant, were greeted with warmth, sat in comfort and had a wonderful choice from the menu. It was very good and that was all it was, very good, not unlike  many very good restaurants. It became a special restaurant when the man who owned it came and told us about why he had started it, why he loved the food he had chosen to serve in it and what he had tried to create with the restaurant. That’s when the restaurant became special, it  came alive and became something beyond very good. If you are that special, your suppliers aspire to give you the best and they increasingly do. You spiral upwards.

Our fellow trustee used this story and elaborated on it. Drawing out reminders about how Common Purpose has created, built and lived its brand and how to keep doing this as we grow.

Mark was art form. A man who knows his stuff and knows how to communicate it. It was a privilege to be there. A reminder of what drivel – what amateur drivel – we all talk most of the time.

But I am more interested in unpicking what it takes to earn permission from those who are lead. Is it who the leader is or what he or she does? Or are the two are intertwined? Is it because they can see farther than others and express what they see in an inspiring way? Is it because they take care of the people they lead and help them to achieve great things? Does the answer differ in different cultures? Is it simply because they are older that they have earned the right to lead those that are younger?

I would be interested to see how people would complete the statement below:

“__________ earned permission to lead me because…”

It can be anyone – your boss, a coach, a chair, a friend, a colleague, a family member. Very curious to hear about how and why people have earned permission to lead you.

The Advisory Group for this initiative includes senior leaders from both countries who, throughout the careers and outside their areas of work, have achieved extraordinary things. They set the challenge which will be met by a group of 40 – as Michael Duck of UBM described – hungry, intelligent people from the UK and India, all from very different sectors of work. These future leaders will meet in Pune in India early next year.

After much debate over various tough issues facing both the UK and India today, the challenge the Advisory Group settled on was:

‘If major heart surgery at $1,000 USD can be done, what has to change in how society innovates – including models and mindsets – for this to happen?’

Can it be done at this cost?

A member of our group is one of the few people in the world who would not only know, but could deliver it: Dr Devi Shetty. He has done 70,000 major heart surgeries in his life and opened a hospital with 5,000 beds. He said it could be done.

It was the rest of the Advisory Goup’s response to his statement that was intriguing. It seemed ridiculous, unthinkable…until you clicked that it was him making it.

We pushed him to tell us how much it currently cost. He thought probably $3,000 USD to $5,000 USD in India, so his proposition would probably reduce the cost by 75 per cent in India. He said it costs around $100,000 USD in the States, and he could not hazard a guess in the UK because of how the NHS does its accounting.

We had set some criteria for deciding the challenge for Dishaa. It had to be compelling, common to both countries, big (so it was worth spending time on) and small (so that the group could grasp it – and propse meaningful and potentially achievable solutions).

For so many leaders, Common Purpose provides an opportunity to see the world through other people’s eyes so it’s great that the Common Purpose 360 Day should challenge people to do something along these lines. Common Purpose extends to every leader an invitation to do one thing, big or small, to challenge the way they see the world.

You don’t have to conquer Everest. There are various ways you can challenge yourself to develop a different perspective.

• Visit a part of your city you’ve never seen,
• Subscribe to receive a blog from a writer you’re unfamiliar with,
• Use a different mode of transport for the day to get around,
• Watch a documentary on a topic you’ve no knowledge on,
• Buy your fruit and vegetables somewhere completely different,
• Enrol in a language course;
• Or just invite your neighbours to your house for afternoon tea!

What will you be doing?

One of the things we encourage our 30,000 alumni to do is try and contact other alumni that they don’t know. This year, I hope our alumni will do something a bit more international. Last year there was some wonderful feedback from people who got in touch with alumni in other parts of their cities or from sectors of work different from their own – but seldom in other countries.

Now that Common Purpose operates in so many countries the opportunity to simply email a someone on the other side of the world is incredible.

You can chat to someone who runs an airport in Bangalore, or a community project in a Johannesberg township, or a bank in Dublin, or a hospital in Leipzig, or a parent teachers association in Birmingham, or a town hall in Glasgow, or a policeman in Hong Kong (ok so the first course does not start till November, but soon…!), or a retailer in Budapest.

What an incredible source of knowledge, generosity and insight.

Having said this, I am not going to contact anyone. I am going to try a day of fasting. For some reason Ramadan seemed to go on for ever this year in the UK for my friends who were doing it. They looked gaunt and tired. It must require huge self control, particularly in a country where others continue to eat unaware. Maybe I’ll understand it better if I fast for one day. A small effort compared to their stretch.

Find out more about the 360 Day and get involved at www.commonpurpose360.org

***********

12 October 2010

So the impact on me? Very simple. For half a day I wondered what people are fussing about. Not eating is easy. Then I started getting bad tempered (no, not bad tempered but short tempered). I did start to obsess about the sun and how slowly it moves. I cannot imagine how you fast if sundown is at 10pm and not 7.30pm.
Did I learn anything? I think I was admiring of people who fast for Ramadan before so no change there, but now I think I am more understanding of their occasional (only very occasional!) short temperedness.

- Julia Middleton.

The occasion has me thinking about what is emerging for leaders in India – and Hinglish leaps to mind.

It’s the language of the future I am told – a combination of English and Hindi.

I even met one man in India who told me that English was no longer “yours but ours” because “we are the biggest population in the world speaking it” and it will be increasingly Hinglish.

At a course day a group of participants started explaining Hinglish to me. They showed me how they could switch their phones to HING.

And me, who is so famously haphazard about my use of English, got all offended. So this reminded me that leaders need pushing just a bit sometimes.

I spoke to the participants again and they pretty well told me that I needed to get real. English was their language now and soon most English in the world will be spoken in India. And its Hinglish. The British could get all purist about it, but if they did, they would be left behind.

Bear in mind that I was educated French and am very conscious of failing a language by being too purist.

I heard it spoken and understood two thirds. Some highlights were…

• “Hungry kya? (Are you hungry?)
• “What your bahana is?” (What’s your excuse?)
• “Prepone” (i.e.  dinner plans – if you can postpone them, you can prepone them.)
• “Yeh Dil Maange More.” (The heart wants more.)
• “Life ho to aisi.” (This is what life should be.)

Then a few weeks later I got an official letter from an Indian accountancy firm on and remember reading it and instinctively wondering how poorly educated the author was. Then I realised that it was in Hinglish.

I was watching my sons play and one of the kids had the role of an owner of a corner shop, and he had chosen to put on an Indian accent. As I watched it I thought the boy was playing a pretty cheap caricature, little did he know we was actually speaking the English of the future.

Our UK course participants have discovered that Hinglish is a language that they will need to learn, and not the pigeon English that they currently associate with corner shops. They can see that they better start to understand it.

“I knew I was a leader at work but not for a minute had I thought of myself as a leader of Bangalore”

This says it all. What Common Purpose is about. What has happened to democracy – even a young democracy – that young leaders don’t know that it’s not just about voting but about standing up too. And most of all it says what democracy is. He got it, was up for it and knew he could lead.

India and the UK have much in common. One may be an old democracy and the other quite young, but they have much in common. Leaders have a deep sense of responsibility and possibility in both countries that it does not take much to awaken. They understand the deep cultural implications of one person – one vote, accountability, commitment to transparency and a sense of justice. And they understand frustrations, short-termism and the discouragement of difficult decisions.

That’s why there is such a special relationship between the UK and India that will benefit both. That’s why Common Purpose will continue to grow in India and connect with Common Purpose in the UK.

It’s all about how you ensure that the boards of the future protect us from the disasters over the last couple of years.

I too believe that diversity is one of the keys. Homogeneous boards are complacent and risky. Complacent because it means that the organisations are careless about understanding the modern world and don’t care enough about their brands to adapt and stop hiding behind the old excuses like: “oh but we try so hard but there just aren’t enough people out there”. Risky because homogenous boards develop group think and don’t see some things coming.

But there are two forms of diversity that always seem to be forgotten: age and language.

If all your board is of one generation it will miss things that are intuitive to other generations. And on language: how may British international boards speak enough languages to really claim to be international?

-    Julia Middleton was recently interviewed by Knowledge Peers on managing and sustaining effective boards for not-for profit organisations. You can sign up for Knowledge Peers membership here.

-    About Time is a multi-faceted campaign supported by the Government Equalities Office, Anchor Trust and Common Purpose in the UK. The campaign will increase the number of people involved in public life across the UK, by overcoming barriers that get in the way of participation. At the core of the About Time campaign is the notion that diversity is critical to a board’s ability to spot issues and trends.