Some years ago, a good (and older than me) friend was fond of saying ‘the older I get, the less I know.’ Usually, it followed some unexpected and illogical incident or inquiry. At the time I found the statement a little puzzling. How could we know less, surely with age we know more? And yet...
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...
We might interpret gaps as negatives, a lack of, a hole to be filled, a deficit. Gaps in a usually busy diary might cause anxiety. Am I needed? Working hard enough? Is there a problem? We can obsess when others have knowledge or skills we feel we don’t. A gap. I am learning to think...
When the original 13 colonies merged to form a single US nation the founding fathers adopted the motto E Pluribus Unum – out of the many, one. Notwithstanding the challenges the US and all of us around the world face from division and polarisation isn’t this motto – which speaks so powerfully and inspiringly to...
Change or transformation? Big, fat words, used interchangeably, describing radically different fields of play and outcomes. Change is like moving the deckchairs. Transformation puts us into an entirely different universe. A new state. Reimagined, reinvented. Think tadpole to frog, caterpillar to butterfly. In organisations, and life, change ensures we survive the headwinds and turbulence. It’s...
Okay. That’s not actually true. But it’s heartening that we have just seen the appointment of the first female Archbishop of Canterbury. Japan has its first female Prime Minister in Sanae Takaichi. And the Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to the incredibly courageous leader of the opposition in Venezuela, Maria Corina Machado, despite lobbying...
Too often optics drive the narrative. We’re seeing this daily from global leadership and in the micro in our own organisations and teams. Performance trumping substance, truth and trust. And trust is surely the thing here. Much of social media is eroding the ability to discern truth from fake content. The growing capability of AI...
Mike and the Mechanics famously sang that ‘every generation blames the one before’ and based on a qualitative survey of two – so neither statistically significant or scientific – I am informed that ‘blaming the Boomers’ is a thing among young people. There’s a wake-up call in this. With the many challenges our world faces...
Growth is an ever present in our current discourse – in organisations as well as nationally and globally – centred entirely (or so it seems) on the financial economy. In business it’s about pulling the levers enabling one resource or constraining another to grow the numbers and bottom line in service of an exclusive group...
On one of our recent leadership programmes we asked people to envision the future shape and scope of a particular aspect of their business. ‘How will such and such look and feel in 25 years’ time?’ we asked. For some the pragmatism of now and what we know took over. Others let their imaginations run....