With the increased talk about war, I was reflecting on the role of business leaders and business in general to play a role in establishing peace. We are so used to delegating the responsibility for peace to world leaders and politicians. Or the United Nations. Or NGOs. But don’t we all have a part to...
Maybe ‘un-gifting’ sounds a bit strange as we enter the season of gifting. Yet it might be just what we need. From personal experience, we tend to hold on to things too long. Ideas, ways of working, our expertise, career milestones. They give identity. At times they’re lifebelts. But what if these tethers have got...
Routines, habits, life-acquired filters. They’re helpful in managing the day to day. On the other hand, rigidly adhered to, never examined for value, they become blinkers, or worse, blindfolds, blocking the light of higher possibility. The world shifts, its issues ever more pressing, our perspective stays stuck. We operate solo, and as organisations, on autopilot....
On the whole when discussing the many aspects of leadership we don’t speak much about true intuition or the help that might be available to us by ‘reading the tea leaves’. Walking the cliff path in Cornwall this past week and using the time – while battling the wind and ‘enjoying’ the steep inclines and...
I heard about a local school the other day whose mission is about pupils becoming DHBs (Decent Human Beings) through their education at the school. Not a new idea but an inspiring one. It got me thinking about this in the context of organisational life where values are often mentioned though not always with the...
Most of us are familiar with the change curve and the stages we go through when facing a change – whether one we have chosen or something imposed on us. These days we are most likely experiencing wave after wave of change curve scenarios and finding ourselves at different places on each wave. This can...
Imagine all your previous learning and accumulated knowledge and skills being wiped out and then consider the words of American writer and futurist Alvin Toffler… ‘The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read or write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.’ Toffler’s words recognise the world we find...
Whether we’re more heart on sleeve or more poker-faced, or anywhere in between, we may move through life and especially work assuming our moods are managed, our emotions under our control, perhaps not on display and not affecting others. On occasion we might inquire of our human selves whether that’s really true. Imagine asking your...
In our interactions with others we can often assume that we are all having the same experience, viewing the situation similarly and extracting the same data. The reality is we are having entirely different experiences, picking up on very different things, seeing, and hearing, with different (literally) eyes and ears. If we imagine this in...
Skilful communication is one of the pre-requisites of leadership yet a few conversations in the past week have come as a reminder of how hard we can find it to get this right and how often neglected it is in race to deliver targets. Perhaps the problem is that we see it as a given....