The Worshipful Company of Glovers, never knowingly under-gloved, presented me as Lord Mayor with a seasonal portfolio of manual enhancements: a baseball glove for nostalgia, a golf glove for precision, and barbecue gloves for that most perilous of civic duties—turning sausages without revealing manufacturing secrets. The presentation was a masterclass in applied leather economics: diversification, resilience, and a reminder that, in the City, one must always keep a firm grip—preferably with reinforced stitching.
It was great to award The Chartered Institute for Securities & Investment (CISI) Certificate in Ethical Artificial Intelligence to our first student, Philip Chamberlain. Philip works in Saudi Arabia but flew to Dubai where we were attending COP 28 to receive the award in person. Rapid development of Al technology means that ethical considerations must be taken into account from the beginning of the design process. Over 1000 students and 125 businesses have signed up so far to understand the ethical and management issues in the deployment of AI. Easy to sign up for the course www.cisi.org.ai.
Yes, a misspelling, should just be mangroves, but got up quite early at a man-ly hour and found myself kayaking in the Abu Dhabi mangroves around 05:30 in the morning.
Whilst I’m known to claim that emails from my portable devices emanate from “one of my work/life imbalance machines”, I do believe that if you don’t enjoy your job most of the time, you’re being unfair to yourself. So despite the hairshirt cries accompanying the demanding Lord Mayoral visit programme, 25 countries over 100 days of travel, air miles almost exactly 100,000 – I can only try and pretend that mixing cocktails in the skies on the way to the UAE isn’t fun.
I suspect anyone’s first hosting of a state visit is a big thing, but in my case I have thoroughly enjoyed my many dealings with Korea and was pleased they were my first. There was significant press coverage of the events surrounding the visit, including the economically important. During the South Korean presidential state visit to the UK in November 2023, the UK Government announced a package of commercial deals and business tie-ups at Mansion House worth £21 billion in Korean investments focused on green energy and infrastructure.
Today we held the fourteenth annual Lord Mayor’s Gresham Lecture given by The Rt Hon The Lord Mayor of the City of London and attended by 500 people. Back in 2009, I created the idea of the Lord Mayor’s Gresham Lecture, first given by Nick Anstee in 2010, based on a simple idea: the President of an academic institution should provide an annual academic lecture. I was thrilled to be giving it myself for a change, for many reasons, including:
As a Honorary Life Fellow (2017-) and former Fellow (2009-2013), Trustee (2008-2020), member of the Gresham Committee (City Side – 2013-2021), and member of the Joint Grand Gresham Committee (2013-2021), I am clearly a big supporter of our ‘Tudor Open University’;
As Lord Mayor I have the honour of being President of Gresham College ex officio;
Having given some 29 full lectures as Mercer’s School Memorial Professor Commerce might seem a lot, but add in another eight full lectures as a Fellow, plus over 30 symposia, and quite a few special events, so this was yet another chance to try and get a lecture right.
My aim was to provide an academic backdrop to this year’s Connect To Prosper theme, thus it was entitled, “Connect To Prosper – The Power Of Networks”.
Cities are networked networks of connectivity and information sharing. They create, often indirectly, communication, transportation, commercial, and intellectual networks. For the City of London, expanding and changing networks develop its strengths. Over 40 learned societies, 70 higher education institutions, and 130 research institutes surround the City of London, creating a network of knowledge connections among science, technology, engineering, arts, mathematics, and finance. In this lecture, I drew upon Z/Yen and my more than two decades of research into smart and financial centres worldwide.
I explained how the 2023-2024 Mayoral theme: “Connect To Prosper”, with its emphasis on multi-disciplinary networks, hopes to link forces to advance, just a bit, a few solutions to global problems. The talk was followed by a discussion with Professor Julia Black, Professor Mark Birkin and Professor Michael Batty, whom I thank most sincerely for some excellent contributions.
