Why are we missing the obvious when discussing the Manosphere? What lies behind the growth of the ‘Manosphere’? This phenomenon has been vividly portrayed in a recent film by Louis Theroux. At its mildest, this shows influencers telling young men that things are rigged against them, counselling them to abandon hope of a 9 to 5 job, and instead make their money via narcissistic self-promotion and dubious trading practices. At its most extreme, the manosphere promotes violence against the LBGT community, antisemitic conspiracy theories, misogyny, and the claim that while women should be faithful to one partner men should be free to have as many as they like. Why these prejudices? Is it a hostility to women sharpened by what is felt to be their success at men’s expense? Is it a desire to return to a world where men and women each knew their place? Or is it something else? According to Simon van Teutem, writing in the Financial Times recently, it cannot be the underlying social attitudes of the young. Citing evidence that across western democracies young men aged 18 to 29 are becoming less, not more, conservative in their attitudes, he argues that there must be another explanation: Strip away the misogyny, the supplements, the snarling podcasts and what remains is a simple promise. ‘You can make something of yourself. Yes the manosphere is ideological but its core appeal is about agency.’ He goes on to say that there is ‘a moment somewhere between puberty and adulthood’ , which developmental psychologists attribute to the years between 18 and 29. They describe this time as ‘emerging adulthood’ , a time when people are struggling to work out who they are and what they want. This is a time when people are exploring their identity, discovering and experimenting with relationships without yet having made strong commitments. I can recognise this label. Yet its boundaries feel oddly rigid and artificial. The hunger for some meaningful life experiences starts much earlier than 18 Some Perspective from History Take a look at history. The eighteenth century path to full adulthood was longer but started earlier. A child was playing a full part in the economy by seven, and marrying, on average at 28. Life expectancy at the end of the seventeenth century was 32. As historian John Gillis described pre-industrial attitudes: 'What they commonly called youth was a very long transition period, lasting from the point that the very young child first became somewhat independent of its family, usually about seven or eight, to the point of complete independence at marriage, ordinarily in the mid or late twenties’ That seven year-old also had to be emotionally more independent. One in ten children died in their first year and parents defended themselves against loss by keeping their emotional distance. John Locke tells us in 1697 that the children of the poor must work for some part of the day when they reach the age of three. The boys, according to Peter Laslett in The World We Have Lost , were doing the ploughing, hedging, carting and harvesting, while the girls helped with the house, the meals, and the making of butter, cheese, bread and beer, looked after the cattle and took the fruit to market. The major step towards independence for the child of the seventeenth century came at around 12. By this age, two-thirds had left home and were engaged either as apprentices to a craftsman, in which case the parents would be paying the craftsman a fee, or as servants in husbandry, in which case the master would be paying the servant a junior wage as well as providing food and accommodation. Thus, by their early teens pre-industrial children had entered a stage of semi-independence unimagined by their twentieth century equivalents. They had entered into a contract, which specified their duties and their masters'. Meanwhile physical and sexual maturity came later for the pre-industrial youth. In Norway, where the records go back further than anywhere else, the age of menarche has come down from 17 in 1850 to around 13 today. One mid-sixteenth century encyclopaedia suggests that full physical prowess was not reached until the late twenties All the things that we associate with adult identity - marriage, full economic independence and full physical maturity - came in the twenties, nearly a decade after the child had first left home and begun to feel the need to be self-reliant. The Implications for now A commonsense response to these changes would be to recognise that becoming an adult is a lengthy process, composed of many dimensions, on which society needs to make a start much earlier – at least as early as 12. We need to give young males (and not only young males) a sense of agency, but it is hopeless to start at the age of 16. By this stage 100,000 young people are joining the ranks of the NEET (not in education, employment or training). Many have come away from school wrongly concluding that their poor academic performance leaves them without much prospect of success. Starting around 13 we owe it to every young person to give them experiences outside the academic curriculum that help them to discover where their potential lies and feel wanted by the society they are growing up in. There are many organisations - our own among them - doing this on a modest scale. The recent revision to OFSTED inspection criteria requiring schools to show what they are doing to enhance life skills is a foot in the door. Yet there are a million NEETS. So of course the young men amongst them will be lacking a sense of agency, and at the mercy of the Manosphere’s snake oil salesmen. We are currently denying them, while still at school, effective opportunities to make a difference, to feel needed, to become confident in presenting themselves; to work in teams; to discover the attributes that they have that an exam-dominated curriculum will not reveal. We owe it to them to open the door to meaningful experiences while still at school. For, if this sense of self can be unlocked before age 15, there is still the chance for those feeling rejected and unmotivated by the curriculum to make the connection and commit to routes of study that will fir with their abilities. Take Kevin. Kevin was at high risk of exclusion from school because of his challenging and violent behaviour, poor attendance and poor attainment levels. One year after his participation in our Project Can Do, Kevin’s attendance and attainment had drastically improved. He has now completed his GSCE’s and is studying for his A-Levels. He is the first member of his family to finish secondary school. The school confirmed that Project Can Do played a significant role in his transformation. I remember watching my children learning to crawl. At first they were frustrated, but eventually succeeded in heaving themselves across the carpet. Then they had the confidence to head for the stairs! Babies face a series of hurdles, and gain confidence as they master each one. But what about adolescents in and after secondary school? In spite of recent exam reforms, it still seems to me that we carry secondary school children around for five years, then suddenly drop them and say 'Now walk'. We do not make them aware from of 12of their own responsibility for their own progress. Apart from those most able academically, for whom exams may be the spur, we do not offer them challenges of increasing complexity, from which they could derive confidence and competence. How are they to find out what they are good at? How are they to gain the confidence to go through the equivalent of crawling, the then running? How are they to see wider horizons and face tougher tests? Tackle this and a sense of agency can follow. Ignore it, and the number of NEETs will continue to grow and so will the influence of the Manosphere. Mark Goyder is Founder of Tomorrow’s Company. Tomorrow’s Company has initiated the Can Do programme which enables 13-15 year-olds while in school to discover their potential. The Tomorrow’s Enterprise Foundation is now being created to take this work forward on a larger scale. The historical background to this piece can be found in Something to Prove Author: MARK GOYDER Source: RSA Journal, Vol. 136, No. 5381 (April 1988), pp. 308-320

I woke on Christmas morning feeling positive. I had had a vivid dream. It started after some community incident - vandalism or an attack on some youngsters . People came from all sides galvanised by a desire to give what each could give to make their community better. Everyone was asking what they could contribute. They weren’t waiting for help: they were mobilising and discovering  what power they had. Leadership came from different sources. School students who had been challenged to come up with improvement ideas; teachers sharing knowledge of what had worked elsewhere. Migrant workers offering ideas from their own community traditions. Entrepreneurs and craftsmen offering skills or unsold products. Artists and musicians entertaining the growing crowds. Everyone was contributing something. No-one was complaining, blaming or sniping from the sidelines. A range of very different people were converging in pursuit of the common good. Why this dream now? One reason, is that I had been listening to the 2025 Reith Lectures by historian Rutger Bredman.   In the second   of these Bredman had talked about the most effective movements for change and how a small group of determined people could make a big difference.   In the first   he  captured the ways in which our society had become a spectator society,  busily commenting on social media while levels of volunteering and citizen involvement had dropped.   For more than a year I had been   noticing the way politics gets discussed in language better suited to plumbing or groceries : elections have become full of sweeping claims that a party will be the best choice to ‘fix’ problems and ‘deliver’ solutions. As if any complex or persistent problem could be diagnosed in such facile terms, with voters treated as passive consumers of these efforts. My dream might also reflect the work Tomorrow’s Company has started through its  ‘Can Do’ programmes. I have seen for myself   the impact   when students first break away from the tyranny of exams and are invited to explore their own potential to start enterprises and contribute solutions. This experience, offered within the timetable, often prompts previously disengaged students to reinvest themselves in classroom study with a real hunger for learning. In his book ‘Utopia for Realists’ Bredman deploys the conclusions from empirical research to offer an agenda that might unite most of us. It tackles inequality; prioritises entrepreneurship and wealth creation over the trading of assets; addresses the fundamental challenges of work and leisure in an AI world and puts  anxieties about migration into proper perspective by linking it to the serious shortage of younger people that our ageing societies now face. To be effective, this agenda would need to be evolved out of a process of dialogue and consensus-building, and could only bear fruit after consistent pursuit over more than one decade. It could not survive the crazy steering and screeching U turns so common in adversarial party politics. As currently operated, our system of democratic politics isn’t fixing or delivering anything. It is becoming a delusional race to the bottom – a competition devoted to indulging short-term expectations with little analysis of the fundamental problems and no consistent strategy to resolve them. By its nature this competition drives wedges between people who could, in different circumstances be working together for enduring improvement.   Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country said US president John F Kennedy in 1960. Idealistic? Certainly, but an essential antidote to the consumer politics that is dragging us down into cynicism. We need democracy, of course and even debased democracy is better than dictatorship. But instead of condemning or blaming politicians we need to build back our sense that the quality of our lives depends on what we do ourselves for our communities. The role of government is to underpin and facilitate this communal self-help. We need to re-establish ourselves as a contributing, participating society, not simply a grumpy electorate. And we need to spend more time rediscovering the things we can all agree on.   The BBC World Service runs a marvellous series which is called   ‘People Fixing the World’ . Every week in its programmes one can hear about people of all ages tackling a problem that is close to home and fixable. Citizens fishing rubbish out of the sea; prosthetic limbs for victims of the Gaza war: a school in Thailand where major decisions are taken by the elected school council; a children’s nursery located within a home for the elderly creating intergenerational dividends. Bridget Phillipson, the Secretary of State for Education has required OFSTED to start assessing schools on the extent to which they are enriching the life skills of their students. That is a welcome first step. Imaginative leaders in schools and Academy trusts could build on it, and introduce into the school their own version of ‘People fixing the world’. That would lay a real foundation for the contribution society that our democracy needs to become.  Tomorrow’s Company can testify from its own ‘Can Do’ programme that it is possible, within the timetable, to awaken students to their potential to make a difference in the communities in which they live and study.   That Christmas dream has helped me understand the link between two problems –  disillusionment with our dysfunctional democracy and demoralisation amongst youngsters discarded by our diploma driven education system. If within the school curriculum those young people could have an early experience of making things around them better, what a tone that would set both for their own future and that of our democracy.   Mark Goyder is Founder of Tomorrow’s Company and Senior Advisor to the Board Intelligence Think Tank.  With the support of the Telos Foundation, Tomorrow’s Company is pioneering a growing range of projects for secondary school students.

In the USA,   the Wall Street Journal tells us , the Long-Term Stock Exchange plans to petition the Securities and Exchange Commission to eliminate the requirement for companies to issue a quarterly earnings report.   This story took me back twenty five years, to an invitation from the International Investor Relations Federation to talk to their members about the future.   Predictions for 2020  Borrowing from author Thomas Friedman, I predicted the news in September 2020. ‘The main headline again. The US Government has been acquired by Microsoft Corporation for an undisclosed sum.’ I may have been wrong about Microsoft, and it may have taken an extra five years, but for Gates read The Trump Organisation and that prediction begins  to look credible.   What of my predictions about the future of investment? My (not very welcome!) argument then was that the role of Investor Relations Officer would have disappeared from companies. Helped by better technology, more accessible data and information, more stakeholder accountability, and better governance, the world of investment would become ever more divided. I used the metaphor of a tuning fork. One prong represented stewardship, the other trading. On the stewardship side would be a few people who truly understood companies within a sector, understood their business models and capably assessed their leadership and their prospects. Companies wouldn’t need investor relations specialists  – people employed to massage perceptions of the company and give hints about its future earnings. The measurable progress of the company on tangible and intangible criteria would speak for itself.   On the trading side of the fork I foresaw: ‘a system full of huff and puff and spin from people who had …a one dimensional view of risk’ Here I saw the investor relations officer’s skills, and those of the analyst, being reduced to a piece of software. Replace the word software with AI and again that feels credible.   A quarter of a century has passed.  Technology may have changed, but the divide remains. On one side are rigorous investors assessing the quality of a company’s leadership and its character and intangible capital, and what Unni Krishnan of   Long Wealth would call the 70% zone of value creation . On the trading side, the ‘earnings game’ continues. Around it has grown a whole industry dedicated to riding the waves of the market. Take this example from   Saxo , urging investors to understand the calendar of quarterly earnings statements, and the ‘ rhythm of the calendar’.  It reads rather like those handy hints a newspaper offers gardeners  on when to plant their potatoes. ‘ Timing matters because expectations build in advance. Analysts revise forecasts, investors position portfolios, and volatility rises as results near. By the time numbers land, markets are primed for a reaction.   What is the market in equities for? Markets are good servants but bad masters. Equity markets don’t exist to create a good living for those employed in them. They are there to serve entrepreneurs and the enterprises they create;  and to serve savers and the capital they invest. The test should be the financing of enterprises so that they can better create wealth and thereby build a stronger economy which better serves society.  Let’s call this a stewardship view of capitalism. Abolish Quarterly Earnings Statements – or develop a real agenda for change? Which brings us to 2025 and the call for the abandonment of quarterly earnings statements. This might free up more time for entrepreneurs and managers to concentrate on creating wealth. But let’s not get carried away. Quarterly earnings statements are a symptom, not the cause of company short-termism. If governments want wealth creation to better serve society, here’s my UK agenda. . 1)   an unashamed commitment to individual entrepreneurship and agility throughout the education system. 2)   Reinvent our approach to human capital to prepare us for the world of AI. Replace testing-obsessed Victorian knowledge factories with educational approaches that emphasise discovery and unlock creativity and entrepreneurial imagination in its young. 3)   Make the   wellbeing of future generations   the first objective of every regulator – just imagine how different an outcome we might have enjoyed from the water industry under such a regime. 4)   Building on the 2025 Mansion House Accord   mobilise the UK’s domestic asset owners, including pension schemes,  to collaborate in creating a powerful investment force capable of taking risks and investing in the expansion of our home-grown unicorns like   Stephen Critchlow   rather than forcing them to sell out to US owners. 5)   Make the City of London a world leader in stewardship, good governance and responsible wealth creation, backing those breakthrough companies which are finding solutions to the next generation’s environmental, housing, energy and community problems. 6)   Base our country’s industrial strategy on the growth and encouragement of such dynamic home-grown purposeful companies with a long-term focus. 7)   Deploy the public sector’s purchasing power (approaching £400bn a year in the UK ) to require   due diligence around the character and culture of the companies   which government selects as partners or suppliers. (Just imagine the difference that could have made to Fujitsu and the Post Office!) 8)   Prioritise family ownership and employee ownership and community ownership and mutuals and all the hybrid private forms of ownership that allow a founder to pass on a business without becoming a hostage to quarterly earnings statements. Maintain inheritance tax rules that make it possible to pass on your family or private business to the next generation. 9)   Follow the agenda championed by late Sir David Cooksey on ‘how to turn good science into good business’  through rebalancing the incentives between growth-focused venture capital and the extractive part of private equity.[i] This is the start of an effective wealth creation manifesto yet to be written. Quarterly earnings reporting might be part of it. But only as a footnote.   Mark Goyder is the Founder of Tomorrow’s Company and Senior Advisor to the Board Intelligence Think Tank. He is the co-author, with Ong Boon Hwee, of Entrusted – Stewardship For Responsible Wealth Creation, published by World Scientific. [i] Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained;  Turning Good Science into Good Business Sir David Cooksey with Edward Russell-Walling Whitefox Publishing 2024.

Tomorrow’s Company is an independent, not-for-profit think tank dedicated to inspiring and enabling business to be a force for good in society. We do that through three key streams of work, our projects, our events, and our publications. Publications Our projects culminate in a summary of all of our research. On this page, you can read about our key projects from previous years on topics including purpose, governance, stewardship and leadership. Our website is currently being renewed. If you have any difficulty finding any of the publications mentioned please contact us using the form at the end of the page or via our Contact page. Family Business Stewardship June 2011 Redefining CSR 2003 From the rhetoric of accountability to the reality of earning trust Tomorrow's Owners Stewardship of Tomorrow's Company Promoting Long Term Wealth Reshaping corporate governance Tomorrow's Global Company Report 2007 Challenges and choices Tomorrow's Global Talent How will leading global companies create value through people? Sooner, Sharper, Simpler A lean vision of an inclusive Annual Report Tomorrow's Business Forms Making the right choices of ownership, structure and governance to deliver success for business and society Tomorrow's Global Leaders How to build a culture that ensures women reach the top RSA Inquiry Tomorrow's Company: The role of business in a changing world

Since 2020, Tomorrow’s Company has been delivering business education programmes for young people in the UK aged up to 19 years old. Our two pioneering programmes form part of our vision for business to be a force for good in the society by both teaching the potency of business to solve some of the world’s biggest challenges and by enabling businesses to achieve meaningful and impactful engagement with the next generation of employees, leaders and change-makers.  EDUCATION Our programmes Since 2020, Tomorrow’s Company has been delivering business education programmes for young people in the UK aged up to 19 years old. Our two pioneering programmes form part of our vision for business to be a force for good in society by encouraging future-focused entrepreneurship and fostering an enterprising mindset among the next generation of decision makers and employees. Our school programme is also an excellent way for businesses to play a vital role in the coaching and mentoring of essential skills in young people most in need of support in deprived areas of the UK. In 2025, Tomorrow's Company launched a foundation committed to furthering our beliefs and ethos among the next generation of employees, business leaders and entrepreneurs. The 'Tomorrow's Enterprise Foundation' will be a dedicated division of our charity focusing on three key areas: Reinvigorating the teaching of business education using our many decades of research and work in this area Inspiring and nurturing the next generation of entrepreneurs and business leaders Improving employment opportunities for young people most in need Our programme for schools ‘Project Can Do‘ is a pioneering business and enterprise coaching programme for young people aged between 14 to 16. It is delivered in schools and academies in some of the more deprived regions of the UK. It has been designed in partnership with educators, business experts, local authorities and young people to create a educational experience that bridges the gap between education and employment. Project Can Do has been proven to build confidence, unlock potential, develop essential skills and allows students to engage meaningfully with local organisations, employers and training providers. The key aims of Project Can are: Developing a range of transferable business and life skills for students most at risk of becoming NEET (Not in Employment, Education or Training) Increasing social mobility in regions of limited opportunity Giving access to meaningful career pathways Raising student aspirations Providing effective and engaging alternative education provisions for students with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) Promoting good civic-minded practice and behaviour Furthering the work of Tomorrow’s Company to inspire and enable businesses to be a force for good in society. “To us, entrepreneurship and enterprise is about much more than just starting a business – it instils life skills such as the ability to think creatively and ambitiously. It’s about engaging with the world around you, being curious, embracing failure, identifying challenges and seizing opportunities. Entrepreneurial skills such as critical thinking, problem-solving, teamwork, and resilience are life skills that will help young people to thrive in all areas of their life. Whether it's a journey of entrepreneurship or a pathway to purposeful employment, all young people should be given the head start they need to be happy, to flourish and to help create a world that we can all be proud of. ” Jonathan Maguire Programme Director, Tomorrow's Company Academy Over the course of eight highly-engaging workshops students learn, practice and master a portfolio of essential skills, including teamwork, leadership, communication, resilience and problem solving. These skills are introduced during the first half of the programme and then put into action when the teams are tasked with designing and developing an enterprising idea that enhances their local community. On the final day of the programme, the teams present their enterprise ideas to a room of their peers, teachers and members of the local community. The teams are supported and mentored during the final half of the programme to create a fully-formed business plan and coached to present their ideas to a professional standard. This final presentation day is usually held off-site in the offices of one of our local partners. This provides students an opportunity to experience a professional environment, to meet the employees and to learn about the job functions and potential career paths within that organisation. You can discover more about work and our impact by clicking the link below or visiting www.tomorrowsenterprise.foundation . Tomorrow's Enterprise Foundation JOIN US Let's work together If you’re interested in learning about and getting involved in our work, or would like to schedule a call or online meeting, please fill out the form and we will be in touch. 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Tomorrow’s Company is an independent, not-for-profit think tank dedicated to inspiring and enabling business to be a force for good in society. We do that through three key streams of work, our projects, our events, and our publications. OUR WORK Research and Publications We conduct large-scale and ambitious workstreams that bring together our focus on research and innovation. The common thread that connects all the work of Tomorrow’s Company is a belief in the human purposes of business. Our primary audiences have stayed the same: Business leaders Investors Government Regulators Policymakers, and Educators Business leadership In the original RSA Tomorrow’s Company Inquiry report we focused on business leadership. We developed the idea of an inclusive approach to business success. (See About Us - Our History ) This was widely taken up and its fruits can be seen today in the number of people and organisations championing Purposeful business. In 2007 we published Tomorrow’s Global Company – challenges and choices. In our original (1995) report we had made popular the concept - previously only used in extractive industries of a ‘licence to operate’. In the 2007 inquiry, a group of leaders of global companies and civil society organisations called for global companies to be proactive in ‘expanding the space’ they shared with civil society organisations and governments on issues from climate to human rights. This led later to work on Tomorrow’s Global Talent (2010) and Tomorrow’s Global Leaders – how to ensure that women reach the top (2014). Government Our theme was taken up by the then Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) in the Company Law Review. This lead to the adoption in Section 172 of the 2006 Companies Act of what was described by the DTI as an inclusive definition of directors’ duties. We refreshed our agenda for government with Promoting Long-term Wealth: Reshaping Corporate Governance (2017). In 2014 we started a campaign – which continues to this day - to persuade government to be more rigorous in public procurement and undertake due diligence into the character of the companies with which the public sector does business. Investors We went on to engage the investment community together with business leaders to develop an agenda around investment and ownership. The term ‘stewardship’ was often used in the context of a family business, but our 2008 report ‘Tomorrow’s Owners – stewardship of Tomorrow’s Company ’ suggested that stewardship was a duty of the shareholder. The publication of our report coincided with the 2008 banking crisis. The UK government initiated a review into its causes and, picking up on our work, the reviews chair Sir David Walker put the stewardship agenda at the heart of his recommendations. These included the suggestion, implemented soon afterwards and imitated around the world, for the world’s first investor stewardship code. Together with a group of investment institutions Tomorrow’s Company formed the 2020 Stewardship Group, later the Stewardship Alliance, which helped to influence regulators in improving the UK Stewardship Code and the practice of institutional investors. The report Better Stewardship (2018) summarises its work. Prompted by investors, in 2010 we published Tomorrow’s Corporate Governance: Bridging the UK Engagement Gap Through Swedish style Nomination Committees. In partnership with the then Institute for Family Business we published Family Business Stewardship in 2011. Boards, governance, culture, and risk Our ‘Lessons from Enron ’ 2002 report was groundbreaking in the agenda that it set for the role of the board in upholding values and promoting the right culture. With the help of the Good Governance Forum a powerful network of directors, chairs, company secretaries and governance experts we published practical guides and research outputs on key issues such as board purpose, culture and values, and the role of the NED. To read more about our work in this area, including, the case for the board mandate, and a guide to improving boardroom conversation, click here . The most important of these makes the case for every board to spend time defining its board mandate . Others cover board chairmanship, board evaluation, the governance of innovation risk, and culture. In 2003 we published Redefining CSR , expressing unease about the apparent, and perhaps too easy, victory of CSR. This suggested that corporate social responsibility might be too much about compliance and not enough about conviction. Twenty years on we were expressing the same anxieties about ESG . In 2013 our report on Tomorrow’s Business Forms – making the right choices of ownership, structure and governance to deliver success for business and society suggested that boards needed to keep their current model of ownership and governance under review so it was consistent with its purpose. Reporting Our agenda-setting work on reporting started in 1998 with Sooner, Sharper Simpler – a lean vision of an inclusive annual report. This in time led to further work which paved the way for the Integrated Reporting movement. Mental health and financial inclusion In 2019 nearly 2.8 million people were in work but living in poverty, and four out of every five low-paid workers fail to escape poverty after ten years in work. How can industry help to find better ways to make work pay? How can we help build financial resilience for those facing in-work poverty? How can we build a movement for change to enable this to happen? Through 2019 we held roundtable events and innovation labs with employers, providers of financial wellbeing products, and other experts in financial inclusion. The final report was launched on 30th January 2020 at a Financial Inclusion Summit, hosted by the City of London. The final publication can be found here . Education In partnership with the University of East Anglia, we started to concentrate on how students learned about business and enterprise. We partner with UEA to run a compulsory module for first year students which is focused on business as a force for good in society. By 2021 we decided to devote energy to how younger students were prepared by education for the world of work and business. Under the leadership of Jon Maguire this work has grown so well that it has become a separate charity - Tomorrow’s Enterprise Foundation . You can read more about it here . Meanwhile Tomorrow’s Company has continued its agenda setting work. Starting with its participation in the three Anthropy conferences, it has begun to bring together a growing group of organisations dedicated to responsibility and sustainability and to seek solutions at the level of the system for some of the problems that all those groups have experienced. Latest work Alongside our current developments in our education projects, there are two linked streams of work conducted by Tomorrow’s Company: 'Better Business Through Public Procurement' 'Which companies should I buy, work for and invest in?' They both carry forward the agenda setting work on purpose, values, governance, stewardship and business-as-a-force-for- good which Tomorrow’s Company has undertaken since its foundation in 1996. You can find further information on each of these streams below. This work is carried out in partnership and dialogue with leaders in business and investment, and particularly engages policymakers, NGOs, research organisations and representatives of all key stakeholders. This reinforces the work on Purposeful Business and Sustainability which Tomorrow’s Company pioneered by its original 1995 report with the RSA . The fruits of all our work over 30 years can be found on our Publications page. Better business through public procurement Ten years ago, before all the scandals associated with ‘VIP lanes’ and poor public procurement during the pandemic, Tomorrow’s Company came up with the idea of a ‘Trust Test’ by which private sector organisations could demonstrate their robustness and good character in bidding for public sector work. You can read more about The Trust Test here . Mark Goyder, Founder of Tomorrow’s Company, then chaired a working group within the British Standards Institution (BSI) which developed the idea into a British Standard 95009. The UK public sector spends over £300bn on the private sector, and the purpose of this programme of work by Tomorrow’s Company is to ensure that this spending power is used wisely. There is a huge opportunity to underpin the move towards a responsible wealth creation by applying the criteria which Tomorrow’s Company has developed. You can read more about this in Mark's blog here. Which companies should I buy, work for and invest in? In November 2023 at the Anthropy Conference, Mark Goyder of Tomorrow’s Company partnered with Michael Solomon of Responsible 100 to invite five organisations involved in assessing or promoting purposeful and responsible business to explain their approach. The event explored the underlying principles behind each approach. You can read more about it on Mark's blog post here: What is corporate responsibility and how can I identify it? In May 2024 with the support of law firm RPC, Tomorrows Company convened a larger gathering of likeminded organisations. The aim has been to Deepen mutual understanding between different frameworks and approaches Find common ground and understand how the efforts of each may be complementary Promote these different approaches to enable all to raise their profile in a connected way And through all of this Better equip people to make informed choices about the companies they deal with. All this in the face of mounting evidence about the combined impact of the crises of climate, bio-diversity, war, famine and future pandemics. The meeting discussed lethal threats that may lie ahead. There was much support for the view that there needs to be dramatic change in how companies see their purpose and how they behave; how government budgets and acts and regulates and conducts its procurement; how investors and insurance companies assess risk and reward; how house builders, and infrastructure planners and project managers operate; how public health priorities are set; what we teach in schools and colleges; how food and agriculture operates. Discussions at the meeting and after it have been focused on how to work effectively together to influence government, business, finance, health and education to commit to an agenda of substantial change. All participants felt they wanted to work for a wealth creation system that puts these imperatives at the top of the agenda, not on its periphery. As one put it ‘We don’t want to destroy capitalism: we want it and its engines of invention to be contributing the solutions that human wellbeing demands.’ Work continues on how to make the most of the potential combined impact of such a group. JOIN US Let's work together If you’re interested in learning about and getting involved in our work, or would like to schedule a call or online meeting, please fill out the form and we will be in touch. First Name Last Name Email Leave us a message... Submit Thanks for contacting us!