Charles Leadbeater
Charlie is a communicator, innovator and advisor who has worked with companies, governments, foundations and social entrepreneurs in more than thirty countries.
As a communicator:
He was an award winning journalist on the Financial Times, where he was industrial editor, Tokyo bureau chief and features editor before moving to The Independent, as assistant editor, where among other things he commissioned Helen Fielding to write the Bridget Jones diary column, which led to a string of international best selling books and films.
His TED talks on education and open innovation have been seen by more than 4m people.
He has written international bestsellers - Living on Thin Air and We Think: mass innovation not mass production which have been translated into more than 20 languages. He is also the author of a string of influential reports, from the Rise of the Social Entrepreneur, published in 1996, through to his recent work advocating student agency as the goal for education systems, which has had a major influence on the thinking of the OECD’s Education 2030 project.
At the System Innovation Initiative he was the lead author of its influential Building Better Systems Green Paper as well as presenting at the initiative’s international learning festivals which attracted an audience of more than 6,000.
As an advisor:
He advised Prime Minister Tony Blair directly as well as his Policy Unit at 10 Downing St, going on to act as a strategic advisor to David Miliband in a string of cabinet posts, including Foreign Secretary. He continues to advise David in his role as President of the International Rescue Committee, one of the largest humanitarian NGOs in the world. He has advised governments from the Netherlands and Denmark, to British Columbia and Australia.
He has worked with the chief executives of leading international companies, among them BP, Microsoft and Vodafone, as well as the leadership of numerous organisations from the Royal Shakespeare Company to the Gates Foundation.
Charlie is a long standing trustee of two leading UK foundations, the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, which has an endowment of more than £950m and the Raspberry Pi Foundation, which owns the Raspberry Pi computer company, the fastest growing computer hardware company in Europe.
He also acts as an advisor to a number of smaller social organisations, from The Big House theatre company, which works with young people leaving the care system, to Organise, the online platform for workers to press for better conditions and Mothers-to-Mothers, the peer to peer support network for HIV positive mothers in Africa.
He is a life-fellow the Royal Society of the Arts and a visiting professor at the Institute for Innovation and Public Policy at University College London.
An an entrepreneur and innovator:
Several organisations have been founded in his kitchen, among them Bethnal Green Ventures, the most successful tech for good accelerator in Europe and the Future Work Awards, launched with the Royal Society for the Arts.
System Shift is the latest in a series of startups be has been involved in, including: the think tank Demos, launched in the mid-1990s which went on to have a major influence of the New Labour government; Participle, the agency which set out to design next generation public services whose work has been taken up around the world and Apps for Good, the digital education platform used by thousands of children a year, where he was the founding chair.
Before working at the Financial Times Charlie was a researcher on Weekend World, the leading current affairs television programme, a job he got soon after leaving university. He went to the Vyne Comprehensive school in Basingstoke, failed half of his public exams at the age of sixteen, but then three years later managed to win a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford University, which he left with a first class honours degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics. He has been married for 32 years, has four grown children who all live nearby and two grandchildren who he does not see enough of.
