Patrick MayfieldI'm the author of this site. I help my clients lead good changes well, and to become high performers, positive outliers.
The theoretical physicist, Richard Feynman, was once visited in his office by a historian, who wanted to interview him. Casting his eyes around the room, the historian saw Feynman’s notebooks, and expressed his delight at seeing such “wonderful records of Feynman’s thinking.” “No, no!” Feynman objected. “They aren’t a record of my thinking process. They […]
Out of a chance pattern of coincidences from different sources, I stumbled upon related views on friendship. This was serendipity. Could serendipity be a key to creativity? I sometimes think that we need to value serendipity. Here is a definition of ‘serendipity’: The faculty of making fortunate discoveries by accident. Because experiencing serendipity is accidental, […]
I put together this video as part of our Living as if Your Year Matters course: It reminded me just what a genius the late, great Stephen Covey was. I think I came across this in his book First Things First, which remains every bit as relevant today. What do you think? Leave your thoughts below.
Sometimes we need to lift our heads and figure out where we are going. I was leading a project team meeting the other day, on a project that’s fairly early on in its lifecycle. We focused on how we could work better as a team. We were supposed to return to the strategic intent of […]
“They are stepping over the dead bodies,” I told him. My friend and I met at a business conference last week, and he was giving me his reflections on the new organisation he had been hired into recently as a senior strategist. He spoke about patterns his colleagues no longer seemed to notice. “You still […]
A dangerously underweight fifteen-year-old girl looks into the mirror and sees herself as disgustingly fat. Such extreme conditions as anorexia nervosa are shocking in their effects upon people. However, could we all have milder distorting self-beliefs about ourselves, perhaps? How about this: We walk into a room and believe everyone is looking at us critically? […]
I had an experience this summer from which I didn’t emerge very well. Or did I? You be the judge. I was shopping for summer shoes. So I found a pair I liked in an M&S outlet. So I took these shoes to a stool to try them on. The right shoe did fit me […]
What if creativity always starts with what is in your hand? What if having to create something without reference to what has gone before is illusory. This would mean that being purely original is nonsense. Even God, in the Genesis account, made the man out of the dust of the earth. Was that pure creativity? No. But it was […]
Earlier this month I had the opportunity to interview a couple of my clients from the British Antarctic Survey: Linda Capper, who is the Head of Communications, and Andy Jeffries, the Programme Manager for the new polar research vessel, the RRS Sir David Attenborough. I was honoured to be invited to the launch of the […]
I was honoured to be invited on Saturday to the launch of the British Antarctic Survey’s Sir David Attenborough. Although for me this meant a 14-hour return drive, it was worth it. The launch was a historic milestone and a significant move towards a safer world. Quite apart from that, the launch itself was quite […]