Author name: Professor Canute Thompson

February 23, 2023 Jamaica’s democracy is at an inflection point.   At this turning point we face the prospect of either becoming a country of perverse lawlessness, led by those who make laws, or we take a hold of our collective selves and affirm the principle of one law for all.  The paths ahead of us […]

February 17, 2023 One of the issues which countries and organizations continue to debate is how the written and unwritten standards of leadership are to be applied when there is apparent leadership failure, for example when a head of government or chief executive faces exposure for apparent or suspected wrongdoing.  In some countries, such as

January 29, 2023 The ongoing saga of fraud at the Jamaican investment firm Stocks and Securities Ltd (SSL) and how the discoveries of breaches in its operations were treated by the regulatory oversight body, the Financial Services Commission (FSC), has underscored some time-tested duties of leaders.  While these duties are time-tested, and presumably well-known, there

January 22, 2023 In early January 2023, news broke that several depositors at the investment firm Stocks and Securities Ltd., (SSL) had been fleeced of billions of dollars.  On Wednesday January 18, a document purportedly signed by an investment advisor who was only days before still employed to the company, was in circulation.  The document,

 January 13, 2023 In several social media postings (tweets and articles in this space) I have been discussing the issue of moral leadership and making the salient point concerning the relationship between a leader’s behaviours and that of others in an organization or society in which the leader has influence.  The issue of moral leadership

December 22, 2022 The Government of Jamaica commenced a public sector compensation review process in about 2019.  The new system was to be implemented in April 2021 but was pushed back due to the dislocations to government activity caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.  The implementation was thus slated for April 2022.  That deadline was missed

In January 2021, the United States of America experienced the consequences of the chaos and misery that can flow when leaders invest in lying as a means of gaining or maintaining power.  Donald Trump, despite knowing (as testimony of the 1/6 Commission has shown) that he had been beaten by Joe Biden in the 2020

Steven Covey in his 1990 classic, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, makes the distinction between what he calls character ethics and marketing ethics. Character ethics are governed by a commitment to transparency and grounded in the belief that one should be authentic and be committed to truthful speaking. Marketing ethics, on the other

October 19, 2022 In Martin Luther King’s speech to sanitation workers in Memphis on April 3, 1968, he told the workers that they had some difficult days ahead, but the challenges and possible costs of what his and their actions may bring him, did not matter to him anymore for “he had been to the

October 6, 2022 There has been extensive public discourse concerning the future of Jamaica’s relationship with the British Monarch.  It appears to be the case that most Jamaicans want to sever relations with the monarch.  To be brutally honest, it is largely an inconsequential issue for me, for the simple reason that the idea of