The word 'tickbox' emerged recently as a cynical angle on official or corporate incompetence. They had 'ticked the box' - people said - but failed to act. It is increasingly used to describe this gap between official spin and reality.Yet, says David Boyle in this powerful expose of tickbox culture, that is just the tip of a vast tickbox iceberg. The only people who remain blind to this gap are those rich or powerful enough to run the world, and behind Tickbox lies an insidious phil...

If you thought being middle-class meant your own home, something set aside for the kids and a comfortable retirement – think again.For the first time ever, today’s middle classes will struggle to enjoy the same privileges of security and comfort that their grandparents did. How did this situation come about? What can be done about it?In this beautifully shaped inquiry, David Boyle questions why the middle classes are diminishing and how their status, independence and values...

Not long ago, economic theories were generally based on a narrow set of principles. Then the continuing boom–bust cycle combined with the failure of the best economic minds to ensure that prosperity spreads down through the economy has left a series of very obvious question marks, and the orthodoxy has been challenged from inside and outside the profession. It now seems clear that human beings and the planet have to be brought into the analysis. The first chapter goes right back to the deb...

On his way back from the crusades, one of England's most famous and romantic medieval kings was ship-wrecked and stranded near Venice. Trying to make his way home in disguise, he was arrested and imprisoned and effectively disappeared. He didn't return home for another fifteen months, and at enormous cost - a quarter of the entire wealth of England was paid to win his release.The extraordinary events surrounding Richard the Lionheart's disappearance provides the background to some ...

Only our limited idea of money is keeping us poor. David Boyle introduces us to alternative cash and people who can conjure money – that is, spending power – out of nothing.Until recently, the growth of alternative cash had been the province of big business: phone cards, stamps, air miles and Tesco’s clubcard points all have purchasing power, yet are not cash as we know it. Now, locally created money systems like ‘time dollars’, ‘Womanshare’ and ‘Ithaca hours’ are being invented by...

Economics sometimes seems to be stacked against social, environmental and individual well-being. But it doesn't have to be like this. A new approach to economics - deriving as much from Ruskin and Schumacher as from Keynes or Smith - has begun to emerge. Skeptical about money as a measure of success, this new economics turns our assumptions about wealth and poverty upside down. It shows us that real wealth can be measured by increased well-being and environmental sustainability rather than...

Four strangers wearing restrictive bracelets on their wrists are seated in a spaceship about to depart from an Australian spaceport for a penal settlement on Mars. While guards attend to the final checks for the flight, which will be made on autopilot, the four exchange details of how they came to be prisoners. Their crimes range from the commonplace to the bizarre. One of them also has knowledge about the voyage which, out of an unexpected sense of compassion, he finds he is unwilling to ...

It is the summer of 1990. The first Gulf War looms, the satanic abuse panic rages, and one strange market town, unchanged for decades, suddenly and disastrously runs out of money. The crisis brings together the mayor and the man he wronged four decades before. This is a haunting tale of passing time, and a Pied Piper story for our own era, of the Blitz, the explosion of money, of clone towns, the Wright Brothers and growing up – and local currencies. And above it all, stands the ancient la...

GET SH!T DONE was written for the leader who ends every week exhausted but somehow still feels behind. The one who's involved in everything, deciding everything, fixing everything - and watching the business move slower because of it, not faster. That's not a talent problem. That's a leadership problem.David Boyle has spent decades in business, automotive, management, and leadership, and what he's seen over and over is the same pattern: as companies grow, leaders get buried. The wo...

After the final battle for the City, the great warrior Hector, former Chieftain of the Gatherers, along with Pont the Merchant, embarks on a voyage of adventure to the far south of the Great Sea. And to record their escapades in his grubby, food and wine stained journal, here again is the repellent Urgus. Little escapes his caustic eye; whether in desperate fights with outlandish renegades or a disturbing encounter with a lost tribe, whose exquisite manners conceal an unsavoury inclination...

English culture is confused, muddled and often borrowed. The purpose of this book is to give the reader a complete grounding in the idiosyncrasies of the English and to pin down the absurdities and warmth of Englishness at its best.Featured in this book are such established English cultural behemoths as the Beatles, Big Ben and the Last Night of the Proms alongside less celebrated quirks such as meat pies and the working man’s have...

With the Gatherers no longer needed by the City and suffering from a mysterious illness, Cruge, their new chieftain, leads his people in a hazardous march through Sorg and the unknown lands beyond, in search of a cure at New Edina. Along the way they are joined by Miss Millicent and Chas, the resourceful Mister Pont and the tiny but lethal Femurs. Together the group must face ferocious renegade attacks — and unwelcome love-struck suitors — as they fight for their place in this dangerous la...