Do you ever find yourself wanting to make a difference in the world, but believing that the solutions to some of our most pressing societal challenges are to be found outside of the mainstream political spectrum? What sort of a world do we want to live in, and how do we make that happen?
If so, you've come to the right place, because that's what this channel is all about. But who am I, what do I stand for, and what do I hope to achieve? What's this blog all about?
These are all perfectly legitimate questions, so I think it's time for a formal introduction.
M J Alford
I'm Michael Alford, a visually impaired creative entrepreneur with a passion for making the world a better place, inspired by the transcendent values that built civilisations across the globe and sustained them for millennia. Born in South Africa and raised Roman Catholic, I have always loved learning new things and sharing my knowledge, and as I became increasingly aware of the challenges faced by humanity and its planetary home, I wanted to spend my days initiating and driving positive change for the greater good, and from around my early teens, the idea took form in my head that the best way I could do this was by starting my own business.
I was fortunate enough in high school to study the Cambridge International Examinations curriculum, and thus, when it came to choosing my subjects for IGCSE, one of my choices was Business Studies. I would say that this really was the beginning of my fascination for business. To add to the fortune, I was taught a very logical approach to the subject, based on a simple appreciation for people, their thinking, and the problems they might encounter as consumers and as entrepreneurs and managers. This understanding fundamentally transformed the way I understood the world, helping me see the connections between rationale and events, and inspiring a fascination with the commercial world, and how the levers of commerce could be harnessed to achieve tangible societal benefits.
In 2014, I moved to Great Britain, where I completed my education and began working as a Business Support Apprentice for Bristol City Council, on completion of which I transferred to a different role as a Finance Apprentice. Though the mundane, routine nature of the work I was doing gradually came to erode my motivation, it inspired a fascination for detail in understanding business and commercial processes, drawing on the understanding developed during my first studies of Business back in South Africa.
More profound, however, was a voluntary role I undertook around the same time as starting at the council, working with VICTA Children, a charity supporting children & young people in the UK dealing with a sight impairment, on a new e-newsletter. I absolutely thrived on the role, feeding into the development of the publication, and writing articles for the first two editions. I had already by then come to realise that real change starts with the spread of ideas, and, inspired by my work with VICTA, I began slowly to develop an online personal brand strategy. As I came to explore more of social media and expand my presence, I came across the profession of urban planning, and, with the end of my temporary contract gradually coming into view, it sounded like a great profession for a young mind with lots of different interests, and a passion for making a difference. One word stood out to me, not so much at first - I rather disliked it on first hearing of the concept - but gradually, as the fulcrum around which I wanted my career to revolve. That word was "placemaking". It came to stand out as the epitome of how I viewed the profession into which I wanted to enter, perceiving that great places are made not just by professional planners in ivory towers, but by the people who live, work, and play there, and that if we want to create vibrant, happy, and sustainable places, we must bring the communities that call them home along with us.
In 2019, I started my personal website, then called Michael's Mission, as a blog where I would share my views on current affairs, based on my Traditionalist, Catholic values, but since these would likely have been unfamiliar to much of my intended readership, my first efforts were directed towards a set of informative web pages explaining what I stood for and why. This being the priority, and with little time left after work, Church involvement, and playing in the Bristol pipe band, it was not until the following year that I actually started publishing blog posts.
How things would change in that one year that should need no introduction to anyone! Concerned as much if not more for the freedom of Catholics to uphold our values in a world seemingly increasingly bent on enforcement of values antithetical to our Faith than for my and my family's safety from a virus whose threat was certainly in my view quite real, if a little over stated, I spent far too much time trying to understand what was going on to form a coherent view and share much of it in any depth. But what I saw also fundamentally transformed my view on my purpose as a creator, and how I was to pursue it. It might be all well and good getting stuck into deep discussions of how we were going to make places beautiful and support small businesses, but these would be meaningless if only understood and supported by a handful of people, while the rest of humanity surged against us.
It seemed to me that rather than my previous strategy, I could achieve far more reliable, sustainable and far-reaching results if I developed the blog as a series of posts exploring my views from their fundamental principles, and expanding into a more detailed, but still long-term look at what might be needed to create the world I would so love to see. It should probably come as no surprise that I was fascinated with history and the relics of the past, but what really captured my interest as a aspiring place maker was what our history means to us in the modern era, and the lessons we can learn from the past, not just the failures, but also the successes.
Though my second apprenticeship with the council did grant me something of a reprieve from having to work out what I was going to do, especially as my first apprenticeship came to an end just as the pandemic broke over the world, my days there were ultimately to come to an end. But during this time, I had also begun to dip my toes into photography. At first, I did it for the same reason as anyone else - to capture and share memories of my personal life. But I soon came to realise the enormous potential of the art in sharing examples of great urbanism and hopefully inspire others to join in my efforts - a useful skill as I set out on the blog, especially as the concept morphed from a purely written blog to a multimedia blog and video/audio podcast, which I aimed to illustrate with historically authentic visuals that could draw the viewer in to the history being discussed. I had been on a week-long introductory course with VICTA at the London School of Photography, and after leaving the council, joined another introductory course run by what was then the Prince's Trust. I had always had my creative side, and it found a natural home in this accessible, but enjoyable art form, and when the opportunity emerged to join their Enterprise Program, I thought it was an opportunity I may as well take. If it worked out, it could be a fantastic springboard for grander ventures turning themselves over in my head. If it didn't, then I would just move on, study economics and urban planning as I had been wont to do, and pursue my career by other means. With this in view, I began revamping my constricted and undermaintained website, removing old and irrelevant content, and rebranding to M J Alford to reflect my continuing personal brand invested therein, while rendering it scalable and flexible as a hub and foundation for whatever direction my career might take.
Although I learned a lot from this initial venture, I would say that I learned most of it too late to be really beneficial, and while I still find some appeal in the vision of a classically dressed man taking photos of unique businesses and glamorous events on his retro style camera, I could hardly consider it the best use of my talents if I just worked as an artist and did no more. So while my photography is still very much a part of me as a person, it's come to be more of a hobby, a side hustle to be pursued as and when opportunities arise, and a useful addition to a much wider-reaching skillset which I could not but find better uses for.
Such a lengthy backstory illustrates, I think, something of what it is I offer moving forward. To me, it's a story of trying and learning, and my online content is no different. I'm here to share ideas - some may gain traction, and others will not, but it remains a crucial component in my plan for driving change which I've been developing as the thesis of my own career.
As an enterprise and personal brand, M J Alford exists to empower entrepreneurship as a vehicle for driving positive change and creating a better world. Built on a vision of vibrant, happy, and sustainable communities in which everyone has the opportunity to thrive and achieve their potential and purpose, it's the hub and heart of my online personal brand, empowering all with an understanding of who I am and what I do as an entrepreneur and as a professional, centred around 6 core values.
Traditionalism is the value placed on the timeless wisdom of knowledge, values, and principles bequeathed to us by past generations.
Classicism is the artistic ideal of creating works that are self-evident in their meaning and symbolism and uplift their audience to ideal values of truth and goodness.
Distributism is the economic ideal of empowering small businesses and co-operatives as a means for achieving and maintaining as even a distribution of wealth as possible.
Corporatism in the traditional understanding (as opposed to the modern, Capitalist one) is the principle that all men must work together as individuals and through the various institutions of society to achieve the common good of all.
Localism is the ideal of keeping as much of politics, culture, and business on as local a level as possible, ensuring the interests of local communities are retained at the heart of planning and decision making.
Sustainability refers to the ability of a community or institution to continue functioning for the common good of its members and stakeholders, and the ideal of ensuring this long-term stability is secured.
Diversity is the value placed on the societal contributions of different people from varying social, economic, and cultural backgrounds, striving to ensure that all have the opportunities they need to contribute according to their ability and achieve their full potential.
Some of these values might seem quite distant from those commonly accepted in most developed societies today. Others might seem closer, but then my views on them are probably quite different to the prevailing norm. All are in my view indispensable for creating great places and communities, and while some of my more controversial views may not be so central to this blog or my career ambitions, I nonetheless believe that the only way we can build real political consensus and ensure genuine social and economic progress is if we can have round-table discussions to understand different perspectives, resolve conflicts, and establish points of agreement to chart a way forward. Exactly how I aim to pursue this objective, we will come to in due course, but first, we must zoom out and understand the gameplan.
The 5 Ps of Change
The idea of driving positive change and making the world a better place is one of those nebulous, cliche ideals that, when mentioned, usually draws a mixture of reserved verbal support and downright disapproval for lack of practicality. It would seem to many that things are the way they are for myriad reasons and that there's little anyone can do to change that. Something of this view seems to me to be well-founded, for it is indeed easy to get caught up in the clouds of progressive idealism and completely lose contact with reality and constraints on our objectives. Yet progress and life improvement is a natural and very real human desire, and one which has driven incredible developments in technology for which so many of us can only be grateful. "What If?" can seem rather pie-in-the-sky, yet "What If?" brought me the computer on which I type these words, the camera on which I shot the video, the websites from which I bought the photos and footage illustrating ideas I simply couldn't illustrate myself.
I've long seen entrepreneurship as a key vehicle for delivering beneficial and sustainable change, particularly small scale entrepreneurship. But I also view this passion through the lens of urban planning, observing the link between the urban forma and environment, and the types of businesses that will succeed and contribute to the success and happiness of the community. I view my efforts through the lens of urbanism and urban planning because my focus remains on a vision for places, with all the buildings, people, and institutions that define them. And while planners in ivory towers undoubtedly have a huge influence in defining places, we cannot underestimate the importance of the role of individual people and institutions of all descriptions throughout history whose influence has shaped and continue to shape the character of the environments in which we live.
And by entrepreneurship, I don't just refer to the action of starting a private, profit-making business, or even a new organisation of any description. An entrepreneur is one who initiates and drives an enterprise, and an enterprise, in the broadest possible sense, is simply a human undertaking to effect a change. So whether it's a brand new enterprise being launched, or a project to progress an existing organisation, it's still progress and change being initiated and driven by entrepreneurs.
This thinking led me to develop the 5P framework for driving beneficial, successful, and sustainable change, which has increasingly become the guiding principle behind my career and the management of the apparent divergence of entrepreneurship and urban planning.
Principles - what is important to us?
Place - What kind of places do we want to live and work in?
Process - How do things currently work, how should they work, and how do we want them to work?
Plan - How do we we get from the current state to the envisaged state?
Policy - What are the fundamental approaches we need to have in place to ensure our places have the best chance of success?
People - What kinds of people contribute to great places, and how do we become ourselves the kinds of people we want to see in our communities?
This framework can be applied to any place, community, or institution, but note that the order here is really important - no change can be effective unless we start with the end in mind and work backwards to consider how we are to achieve it. Exactly how we might approach this framework will obviously differ depending on the place, community, or institution in which we want to effect the desired change, but what is absolutely common to any change or enterprise is the need to map out the best route from the current state to the desired one, so that we can engage effectively with the people whose support we need. However, the framework can also be seen to be cyclical, because once processes are understood, plans are made, and policies laid down, it comes down to people to work on achieving the desired outcomes, as it takes people to envisage and plan.
Traditionalist Revival
As an enterprise, M J Alford is central to my plan for re-establishing traditional values in society, presenting a vision, explaining the process, and building support. This is why I see the 5P framework as being so important, because if we want to progress towards a society built on traditional values, we need to convince people that such a society is actually good for them, not just a winding back of the clock to some phantasmically archaic age when practically no-one enjoyed any freedom or comfort. I obviously would make the case that it is absolutely possible to build a society based on traditional values without sacrificing many of the basic freedoms and comforts we've come to expect in the 21st century, but that does mean some rethinking of what is most important to us as individuals and as a society, and reimagining our world in ways that are possibly quite unlike anything we have ever seen. And even if people accept that perhaps a return to traditional values might be a good idea, they often end up seeing such an enterprise as being too far-fetched and ideological to be realistically feasible. Again, I disagree, but again, we need to be able to reevaluate what is essential to these values and rebuild according to the demands of modern society. In other words, to have the support of people (and we need a lot of that), we need to have a clear plan and well-defined policies if we are to convince them that the whole enterprise is feasible.
One might be tempted to think of everything as to far gone and in a state of "doom & gloom", but I actually believe that the appetite for a society built on traditional values has never been greater for the last century, as people increasingly realise that the trajectory our world has taken for the last two centuries is hardly sustainable or long-term human happiness. The problem is that different sides of the political spectrum have picked up and overemphasized different problems, while simultaneously downplaying if not downright ignoring others. Some have tried to take a more Centrist approach, but sadly they are too few, and their views too seldom heard to gain a real foothold in the public discourse to be genuinely impactful. But I still take hope in the possibilities that emerge when we are willing to rethink our priorities without the distorting lense of ideology, and consider just for once the tried and tested values that are proven as robust foundations for a society that secures the good of its members.
Obviously, however, people are still going to need convincing, and the need to do so is greater than ever. Time waits for no-one, and as long as poor information and attitudes remain, bad decisions will continue to be made. Yes, change starts with individual people, but it is really powered by people working together in communities, institutions, and organisations, and if we want to change the world for the better, then we have to reach the people in organisations and institutions that are the real movers and shakers of the world, convincing them that it is both worthwhile and feasible to enterprise on traditional values.
Exactly where I would fit in to such a grand enterprise, and what role is to be played by my business of M J Alford has proven rather hard to pin down, but I don't think that's an entirely bad thing, because at its core, it's designed to be a representation of my personal brand, and right from the get-go, I wanted it to be a brand that could morph and adapt to reflect the inevitable changes to my career trajectory, and there are so many different areas that attract my professional and entrepreneurial interest. Overall, though, I would resolve my mission into four key long-term strategies.
Educating people on the values and their application in the modern world, empowering them to be informed decision-makers as consumers, employees, entrepreneurs, citizens, and policy-makers.
Empowering small businesses with the tools they need to gain a foothold and succeed in markets often easily dominated by bigger companies, often with more financial resources and market leverage.
Encouraging, inspiring, and guiding large private and community institutions to make the right decisions to deliver maximum benefits for all stakeholders, but particularly for local communities and suppliers.
Working with planning authorities and policymakers to make the right planning and managerial policies to support and encourage the creation of unique, vibrant, and sustainable local places.
These strategies are clearly each quite a different animal from one another, and they ultimately require different areas of expertise and professionalism, so as much as I'm very much interested in all four of these strategies, that does rather leave me in the difficult position of having to decide between different professions to pursue, each of which has a pretty similar claim to my interest... or does it?
I suppose the obvious long-term strategy here would be a mix of a "squiggly career" with a little "serial entrepreneurship" thrown in. Truth be told, I'm not really a fan of either of those phenomena, and have more affinity with the slightly more old school idea of picking a profession and growing in it, measuring success not so much in financial terms, but in terms of social impact. But it's certainly a possibility, and one which it would be foolish of me to discount. But if I were to seek a common thread of what I can offer, I can't deny that I have long viewed my greatest strength as being at the meeting point of people-focused creative and systems thinking. That's why I find urban planning so fascinating, because it's a profession that is very much focused on the bigger picture, and that is exactly where I am most at home. But more broadly, I could also find myself quite at home in almost anything to do with project management, envisaging and delivering improvements for organisations and their stakeholders.
Thus, one might describe me as something of a "thought leader," another term which I disdain to use as a self-description or self-appointment. But here again, I look at the M J Alford enterprise not as a vehicle for getting rich and/or famous, but as a mere means of spreading good ideas and driving humanly sustainable progress, and if another were to pick up the baton and run with it, leaving me behind to merely scrape a living, I would have no complaints, but in stead, be glad that the work continues.
Online Business
Core to the M J Alford enterprise model is its role as a medium for inspiring and empowering entrepreneurship to make a great place of every place in the world. Consequently, communication of ideas, ideals, and values remains at the heart of the model. It's my personal website, my personal online brand, where I want to be able to be frank about the values that inspire and motivate me, and thus, make my contribution to the conversations which we need to have to create great places. It's the place where I can offer my creativity, knowledge, and skills to the world, a truly independent representation of my values, ideals, experiences, and perceptions. It could not and is not meant to be the lecturing of a master, but the reflections of a journeyman in search of knowledge on how to create great places, and sharing his experiences along the way.
As a business centred around online content marketing supporting a mixture of online and in-person products and services, M J Alford is modelled on 7 content pillars, each of which supports additional, paid content, products, services, and resources. These pillars are sequential, progressing from values and ideals to practical ideas, strategies, and tactics, like the levels of a pyramid or stages of an experiment. So while there will be some free content for all pillars, the paid products, services, and resources going into the later pillars will most likely be less appealing to the majority of my audience, but designed to be more valuable to those to whom they are relevant and appealing.
Michael's Mission remains as my flagship blog category and multimedia podcast, available on all major video and podcasting platforms in addition to the written transcripts on my main website. This is the core pillar of the M J Alford content strategy and business model, and the executive summary of the M J Alford thought experiment, where I sum up my thoughts, experiences, and knowledge to be most widely accessible. Though the other pillars may overlap, they also are designed to support standalone content exploring certain topics more deeply in formats unsuitable for the multimedia blog/podcast format here employed.
Michael's Musings is focused on explanations of the fundamental philosophical principles and ideals underpinning my work as a creator, planner, and entrepreneur, as well as on my thoughts on current, topical issues of which little is known, but important takeaways may need to be derived before full facts can be established. Fundamentally, this is the place for my thoughts in raw, untested format, the aim of the M J Alford thought experiment, to be tested in the following stages.
Michael's Motivation was a slightly later to the M J Alford content framework, but one which I think is quite possibly one of the most important, because it deals with people and what motivates them/us as consumers, workers, managers, and entrepreneurs. As the hypothesis of the M J Alford experiment, this pillar supports those considerations of the sort of places we want to see created, and how we can get the best out of ourselves and others in the enterprise of creating them.
Michael's Media is the method of the M J Alford experiment, the time for exploring places around the world, and how individuals and institutions have shaped their respective histories and current forms. Thus, seeing how people, institutions and communities can and have managed and solved problems, we can draw ideas for our own times, institutions, communities, and places, and hopefully thereby form a plan for their improvement.
Michael's Marketing is the stage that takes increasingly into the realm of the commercial and entrepreneurial, as the results of the M J Alford experiment, because it's on this pillar that we will begin to think about that all important concern of how any enterprise is to be marketed to its stakeholders, so as to gain their critical support and bring the enterprise to success. Here, we are not just thinking of the obvious stakeholders to which one would "market" in the typical understanding, but all stakeholders, investors/shareholders, employees, local community groups, etc. All have an interest in and influence on the success of the enterprise, and all must be convinced of the benefits of the enterprise for them if they are to lend their support and custom. Consequently, a really important consideration or any enterprise, but most especially one based on some novel or unfamiliar idea, must be marketed to its stakeholders, and here, we will draw on the understanding gained from the previous stages of the M J Alford experiment to begin to understand how this might be done.
Michael's Modelling represents the analysis stage of the M J Alford experiment, whereby we attempt to understand by logic and data the processes by which people, markets, and institutions function. Hence, we can more easily understand where the problems lie, and what the solutions might be, allowing us to begin to form a plan, whose execution comes in the next stage.
Michael's Management is the final pillar of the M J Alford business model, and the working conclusion of the M J Alford experiment. Armed with an understanding of how the world works, we will proceed to consider how we are to implement the solutions to the problems requiring solving in our communities and institutions and draw them to successful conclusions.
We can also see a distinction between the first four pillars, which are more personal in nature and focus, and the second three, focused as they are on commercial content, but here again, there is some overlap. While my main site (mjalford.online) remains the core online hub of the entire enterprise, supporting the greatest variety of content formats as well as my main online store, there are also a couple of associated websites focused on more specific content.
My personal blog hosted on Google's Blogger service is focused lifestyle and travel advice, living out traditional Catholic values and exploring the world in spite of the challenges of a visual impairment.
My Tumblr feed is essentially a curated version of my overall social media feed, with personal updates and thoughts, as well as work beyond M J Alford, all presented with the M J Alford branding.
My insights feed on Substack is the main host to the video versions of Michael's Mission, as well as personal and professional insights into current and long-term political and cultural issues.
My articles feed on Medium is my second host for long-form articles, this time, however, with a greater focus on entrepreneurship, leadership, and social change.
My photography site on SmugMug remains as the personal online home of my photography business and all my major projects, serving as the medium for sharing work with clients as well as hosting my second online photography-only store with more photo prints and downloads for those after something a little more specific than those offered on my main store.
Of course, I'd love all my audience to join me on the journey, with no expectation of any purchases. What is most important is the free sharing of ideas. That was why I started Michael's Mission and M J Alford, and that will always be fundamentally core to the enterprise of M J Alford.
Personal Brand
While the media and content side of M J Alford is central to the enterprise as a vehicle for exploring traditional values and their application in the modern world, and is thus designed to be self-sustaining for the long-term, I would still consider it an uner-utilisation of my skills if I were to go no further. The time for delivering change is now, and there could be no better proof of concept than to support those corners of the planet where people already seeking to return to traditional values. That's why three of the four long-term strategies already discussed relate to working with and supporting organisations and institutions of various descriptions to help them maximise their social impact and play their own respective roles in delivering change.
This is really where I would see a lot of potential for different working solutions for me to offer my skills to help people on a more personal level beyond my online content and resources. When I set up M J Alford, I did so with the view of starting out as a photographer, then expanding into other areas of marketing, branding, and entrepreneurship. I had also long held the ambition of working as an urban planner, perhaps one day running an agency of my own, and helping in that capacity to plan and create sustainable, happy places. I would view my creative work as a practise of my preaching, working as a sort of modern reincarnation of a Medieval artisan who plied his trade for a living, and helped shape his city through his involvement in his trade guild. Perhaps he might become successful and wealthy enough to invest into other ventures, or take up some form of public office.
All these thoughts have their relevance and their place, but I would not want to confine myself to one strategy at the expense of foregoing invaluable opportunities to work with and support others who are on the same mission, be that as a freelancer working for a client, or an employee working for an employer. What is most important to me is that M J Alford remains as my own personal enterprise, representing my views and brand as a professional and thought leader, independent of any client, employer, or any other organisation or institution with which I may be associated.
Moving Forward
In this first installment of Michael's Mission, I have attempted to define the challenges associated with rebuilding a world inspired on traditional values, and how I have set out to solve them. But the question still remains; what are those traditional values, what does a world inspired by and founded upon such values look like, and how do we build it? I have attempted here to provide a basic outline, but of course, there is so much that can be said, and every idea rests on presuppositions and predicates that need explaining. All of that could not be explained in one post.
That is why I set up M J Alford and the podcast, Michael's Mission, to explore and share ideas and resources as I go along. So I would love for you to join me on this journey, connecting on social media and letting me know your thoughts and questions, and I will strive to answer them all.
Thank you for reading!
