People who stand up and don’t grovel. Whether they are swanky or not. Whether they change the world or just their streets. People who take a step forward rather than back when faced with a challenge.

Who inspires you? What do you see in people that makes you want to learn a new skill, strive to achieve, reach your goals?

Common Purpose

Common Purpose gives leaders the inspiration, the knowledge and the connections they need to produce real change. Through our unique leadership development courses, a growing number of people around the world are making a difference in the industries and places where they work, in the communities where they live and in wider society.

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1. Ronald Arculli
2. Narayana Murthy
3. Jude Kelly
4. Marjorie Scardino
5. Cyril Ramaphosa
6. Matt Baggott
7. Helena Kennedy
8. Devi Shetty
9. Isher Ahluwalia
10. Bernd Kundrun

Who would make your top 10 inspirational leaders? What is it about them that makes them stand out? Share your top leaders…

Common Purpose

Common Purpose gives leaders the inspiration, the knowledge and the connections they need to produce real change. Through our unique leadership development courses, a growing number of people around the world are making a difference in the industries and places where they work, in the communities where they live and in wider society.

Website - Twitter - More Posts

I met a young leader recently who had just unharnessed herself from a big job. She just walked. They must be furious with themselves for losing her. And she is so frustrated and angry, talented and successful. She could not understand why established leaders were so intolerant of the young. Finally she burst out, “Why should we grow up when you lot refuse to yourselves?” I thought it was a good question.

At Common Purpose I am watching some of our young talent fly high and wide, and what a joy it is. But the harnessers do seem to dominate; you almost feel it’s that they want to harness talent so that it too can suffer and survive “as we did”. I hope the harnessing stops soon because we will need all the young talent we can set free to accelerate, when the time comes, out of the chaos we now find ourselves in.

Julia Middleton

The objective seems to be how to appear to be authentic. The view is that we should accept that authentic is an illusion - but an important illusion which needs to be created. And this in the context that we are addressing an audience, whether they are customers, stakeholders or citizens, that has largely lost the ability to discern what is authentic anyway. Given that we are often presented with leaders who claim that one identity after the next is the really authentic one, it’s not surprising that we begin to lose our ability to discern the real one.

As one new authentic version appears, no-one seems to spot that its very presence puts in doubt the previous authentic version (and indeed this one too). When the leader cries, is he or she authentic? Is authenticity only revealed in the toughest of times, when a leader gets into a fight, a real scrap?

Then the other word that slips in near to authentic is “moments”, and that’s the finale. Is authenticity revealed in moments, or is it in fact unveiled over time and over a period that the moments have little impact on? Except very occasionally to dramatically destroy it in one stroke!

Julia Middleton