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....
As leaders we all hope to be visionary, don’t we? To aspire and inspire. We are fortunate in our interconnected world to have a window on the efforts of other visionary leaders, their impact and example. We can also discern, for ourselves, any gap between rhetoric and reality. A few days ago I was reminded...
If we are honest with ourselves, we know that most complex problems cannot be solved in isolation by one person. For sure the world is blessed with an occasional genius able to cut through and bring to our awareness a new way to see the world or the issues we are dealing with. However in...
The current trend to create our own ‘mini-me’ doll image through AI will undoubtedly pass as something else captures our imagination. Of course, it’s a bit of fun and probably light relief in turbulent times but it is also a helpful reminder of where we might usefully put our focus. How good could our leadership...
A recent blog from Seth Godin spoke of working to make things better being achieved in small steps rather than big bang, improvement coming incrementally and by repeating and repeating the steps. Of course, we can give impetus to those steps in the objectives or intentions we set…a process that’s a regular feature of organisational...
Wherever we look we’re surrounded by examples of service – the purely transactional of a service provided for which we pay (smile optional) through to the more noble and life impacting work of health and emergency services and the armed forces. In our own lives, when we really think about it, everything we do is...
Tenacity, resilience, powering on and through are qualities long admired in the workplace. The challenge we face is to be clear to what end and with what effect. If it’s just about staying upright and moving forward on what can feel like a treadmill of relentlessness we may be wasting these qualities, and energy, on...