Patrick Mayfield
One of my biggest mistakes in recruiting somebody was early when I recruited a young man, straight out of school, as a COBOL programmer. The warning sign at his interview was his reply when I asked him where he saw his work taking him: I would like your job. I’d like to sit in an […]
In the 1980s, the Irish management consultant, Charles Handy, began to explore idea of portfolio workers. In works like The Empty Raincoat, he saw an emergent reality where more and more of us would have a series of jobs, sometimes simultaneously.
My work seems far from farming. I’m a self-employed coach and writer. Yet, my aunt was right: there are more similarities my work to being a farmer, as I lead myself through the myriad of daily choices in my work, than perhaps first meets the eye.
Sometimes we are the victims of the culture we ourselves create, particularly when we begin to head up teams and organisations.
We do not need to wait for life to change our circumstances. We can change our story. Now.
New to American culture, I was in a mall in Chicago one lunchtime, ordering a ham and cheese sandwich at a deli. It was a simple request. Being British, I assumed they would assume, and fill in the blanks. How wrong I was.
Two weeks ago, I posted a piece on Thanksgiving as a Lifestyle. I went on to list some of the benefits of having a daily routine of keeping something like a Gratitude List.
But, I missed something.
The creative heart has a rhythm of expanding and contracting. When it expands, it creates possibilities, generating ideas, divergent in its thinking, exploring, and pursuing some even further. When it contracts, it is evaluating, assessing, honing, editing, eliminating, critiquing. Divergence and convergence. In any given moment, we do one or the other. The mistake that […]
Preface: As you read this, you may think this article is posted a week late. Please read on. Outside of the USA, most countries do not celebrate Thanksgiving as a holiday. And here in the UK, there is a particular suspicion over American holidays. (For example, we Brits have mixed feelings at best about the […]
A few years ago, I was called in to consult for a large IT transformation programme in healthcare. It concerned a large teaching hospital over a number of sites across a major city. The change would be so radical to current working practices that the systems provider had even built a simulated ward where the […]