Spring 2012 | Public lectures and events | Video

Contributor(s): Bernard Hogan-Howe | The current commissioner of the Met and former chief constable of Merseyside Police will speak about his hopes and aspirations in relation to the future of policing in the capital. Bernard Hogan-Howe is the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Service.

Contributor(s): Professor Michael Kimmel | We hear, occasionally, that women's studies discriminates against men. More often, it's that women's studies doesn't include men. In this lecture, Kimmel will suggest that women's studies provides an essential framework for understanding men's lives, and that framework actually will enable men to experience richer and fuller lives. By addressing several key thematic areas -- work, family life, sexuality -- he will show that the insights generated by women's studies are both available to men and, indeed, necessary for men to live the lives we say we want to live. Michael Kimmel is among the world's leading researchers on men and masculinities. The University Distinguished Professor of Sociology at State University of New York, Stony Brook, he is the author of the best-seller, Guyland: The perilous World Where Boys Become Men as well as The Gendered Society, Manhood In America, Men's Lives, A Gay's Guide to Feminism, and many other works. He is the founding editor for the scholarly journal Men and Masculinities.

Contributor(s): Professor Philip McCann | The special adviser to the European Commissioner for Regional Policy will discuss one of the great policy-making challenges of recent times. Professor Philip McCann is special adviser to Johannes Hahn and the University of Groningen Endowed Chair of Economic Geography.

Contributor(s): Eric Ries | Most new businesses fail. But most of those failures are preventable. The Lean Startup is a new approach to business that's being adopted around the world. It is changing the way companies are built and new products are launched. The Lean Startup is about learning what your customers really want. It's about testing your vision continuously, adapting and adjusting before it's too late. Now is the time to think Lean. This event marks the publication of Eric Ries new book The Lean Startup. Eric Ries is an entrepreneur and author of the New York Times bestseller The Lean Startup and the popular entrepreneurship blog Startup Lessons Learned.He co-founded and served as CTO of IMVU, his third startup. In 2007, BusinessWeek named him one of the Best Young Entrepreneurs of Tech. In 2009, he was honoured with a TechFellow award in the category of Engineering Leadership. He serves on the advisory board of a number of technology startups, and has consulted to new and established companies as well as venture capital firms. He is currently serving as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Harvard Business School and a Fellow for IDEO, the design consulting firm. His Lean Startup methodology has been written about in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Harvard Business Review, the Huffington Post, and many blogs.

Contributor(s): Professor Owen Flanagan | Can Buddhism be re-discovered as a naturalistic and comprehensive philosophy that is compatible with the rest of knowledge, yet capable of pointing us to a path of human flourishing? Owen Flanagan is James B Duke Professor of Philosophy at Duke University.

Contributor(s): Professor Juliet Schor, Professor Lord Skidelsky, Professor Tim Jackson | As the economic crisis deepens, this is the moment to consider moving towards much shorter, more flexible paid working hours – sharing out jobs and unpaid time more fairly across the population. The new economics foundation (nef) set out the case in its report 21 Hours: Why a shorter working week can help us all to flourish in the 21st century. Now, in partnership with CASE (Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion) at the London School of Economics, this event brings together a panel of experts to examine the social, environmental and economic implications. They will consider how far a shorter working week can help to address a range of urgent social, economic and environmental problems: unemployment, over-consumption, high carbon emissions, low well-being and entrenched inequalities. Juliet Schor is Professor of Sociology at Boston College, and author of Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth, and The Overworked American. Professor Lord Skidelsky is Emeritus Professor of Political Economy at the University of Warwick and biographer of J. M. Keynes. He is the co-author, with Dr Edward Skidelsky, of the forthcoming book, How Much is Enough? Economics and the Good Life. Tim Jackson is Professor of Sustainable Development at Surrey University, and author of Prosperity without Growth.

Contributor(s): Angus Roxburgh | Former BBC correspondent Angus Roxburgh talks about his new book on the Putin years and Russia's relationship with the West. Drawing on exclusive interviews conducted for a new BBC documentary series, he describes Putin's descent into authoritarianism, and also argues that the West threw away chances to bring Russia in from the cold, by failing to understand its fears and aspirations following the collapse of communism. This event marks the publication of Angus Roxburgh's latest book The Strongman: Vladimir Putin and the struggle for Russia. Angus Roxburgh is one of Britain's most distinguished foreign correspondents. An author and renowned journalist, he was the Sunday Times Moscow Correspondent in the mid-1980s and the BBC's Moscow correspondent during the Yeltsin years. He is the author of The Second Russian Revolution and Pravda: Inside the Soviet Press Machine.

Contributor(s): Daniel Sieberg | At the start of the new year, Daniel Sieberg, author of The Digital Diet: The Four-step Plan to Break your Tech Addiction and Regain Balance in your Life offers timely advice for technology gluttons everywhere, explaining how best to ditch the digital dependency, take back control of your life, restore real relationships, and use technology in a healthier way. Daniel Sieberg works with Google marketing in New York. An Emmy-nominated journalist he is a former technology correspondent for CBS and CNN, and previously hosted science and technology programmes for online channel ABC News NOW.

Contributor(s): Masaaki Shirakawa | Until a few years ago, the long stagnation of the Japanese economy after the bursting of a credit-fuelled asset bubble in the late 1980s was regarded as an episode that would never be replicated elsewhere in the world. Quite a few commentators argued that the recovery became unnecessarily drawn-out and painful because policy responses were ill-timed and inadequate. Many experts believed that prompt and massive policy responses would save any other economy from the same fate as Japan. Three years after the global economy had nearly suffered a meltdown in late 2008, following the collapse of Lehman Brothers, growth, especially in the developed economies, remains anemic, in spite of the huge fiscal stimulus and decisive monetary easing quickly introduced by governments and central banks. Economists are drawing graphs of current GDP, inflation, property prices and interest rates superimposed with Japanese data from the 1990s, revealing eerily similar patterns. Now, there is a growing fear among the general public of a prolonged period of weak growth in the developed economies, expressed in one word as "Japanization." TMasaaki Shirakawa is the Governor of the Bank of Japan, he will reflect on the experience of Japan leading to and following the bursting of the Japanese bubble, drawing particular attention to the fragility of the recovery under economy-wide deleveraging. There will be a discussion on the similarities and dissimilarities between Japan in the 1990s and the current state of developed economies, with an added emphasis on factors behind the credit and asset-price cycles, including demography, the structure of the labor market and the sectoral distribution of debt. Another issue to be examined is the increasing concerns over the sustainability of government finances after massive fiscal stimuli. The speech will conclude by exploring the role of policy in sustaining and strengthening the recovery under the dual constraint of fiscal sustainability and the zero-bound on nominal interest rates. TMasaaki Shirakawa was born in Fukuoka Prefecture in Japan on September 27, 1949. Governor, Bank of Japan since April 9, 2008; Chair of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) Asian Consultative Council since October 2010, and Vice-Chairman of the Board of Directors of the BIS since January 2011; Member of the Group of Thirty since August 2009. Graduated from the University of Tokyo with a B.A. in Economics and hired by the Bank of Japan in 1972, he completed his advanced training at the University of Chicago (M.A. in 1977). At the Bank of Japan, his career encompassed both monetary policy and financial stability, and held key positions, including Executive Director (2002 - 2006), responsible for laying the groundwork of Japanese monetary policy decisions. He also had extensive international experience, as the General Manager for the Americas and as the Advisor to the Governor for International Capital Markets. Leaving the Bank in July 2006, he assumed Professorship at the Kyoto University School of Government until March 2008, when he rejoined the Bank.

Contributor(s): Professor Roger Owen | Professor Owen will look at Egypt's Tahrir Square revolution in the light of the revolutions of 1919 and 1952, drawing on them to indicate some of the problems and possibilities ahead. Roger Owen is A J Meyer Professor of Middle East History at Harvard University.