Online event: Leadership, trust and responsibility in times of stress

Charlie Dawson and Dr Jamie Dow offer their insights into how businesses can best understand their responsibilities, and maintain the trust of customers, employees and the wider public.

Charlie Dawson established The Foundation in 1999 with the aim of helping organisations be more sustainably successful by being customer not financially led.

His original inspiration came from working on a new car company launch that did this by happy accident to great effect, breaking records for speed of growth and disrupting an inward-looking market. Recent projects include helping the Morrisons turnaround, finding their voice as foodmakers and shopkeepers with a sense of purpose and belief, helping Be the Business tackle the UK’s productivity crisis by getting small businesses into useful action, helping The National Trust find new sources of sustainable growth complementing their membership offer, and helping John Lewis flesh out a future in Home Services as a customer-centred business. 

He has a book about customer-led success that will be published in 2021 explaining why something that looks attractive and obvious is rare and, even when achieved, usually temporary. This led to exploration of the shared beliefs people have in organisations about what success is and how it is achieved. This gets into the whole area of why organisations exist and the current often misunderstood debate around purpose which The Foundation now works in with a number of clients.

Charlie previously worked in advertising and has a degree in Manufacturing Engineering.

Dr Jamie Dow is involved in undergraduate and postgraduate teaching, and the supervision of research. His first book (a research monograph on Aristotle for Oxford University Press) was published in 2015. He is currently leading a large scale research project on ethics and leadership.

Before studying for his doctorate he worked in business, first in production and purchasing management with Courtaulds Textiles, and then as a management consultant with Pricewaterhouse Coopers.

Jamie is currently the Development Director for the IDEA Centre, with responsibility for growing the centre’s research-based consulting practice, and securing maximum impact for the innovative research programmes already underway in the centre.

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