I was in a client meeting with a colleague recently and the client complained of it taking him five weeks(!) to arrange a meeting with his line manager to talk about feedback as part of his senior leadership development. My colleague suggested that a formal meeting comes with its own baggage. A meeting has to […]
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What do you do when you are asked to meet a powerful person? What would you do if you invited to see a president, or a king, or a prime minister? You might think, “That would never happen.” But what if it did. What if you were five a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity? How would you prepare […]
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It was a defining moment in the workshop. We had reached a crunch point, and hope in the room that we could get through this was fading. I was running a two-day workshop with about fifty engineers and scientists, discussing the handover from their prime supplier. It was a complex, multi-million dollar project. The problem […]
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Leading in a transparent way generates trust. Transparency lives before people with integrity. But transparency is what a lot of so-called leaders shun. Transparency is a vulnerable place, and for some, that is too dangerous. They would rather hide. Either behind unnecessary secrecy, using information as a weapon, or behind a mask. The problem is […]
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I came across this quote recently via Bernadette Jiwa on her blog, The Story of Telling: ;In the past jobs were about muscles, now they’re about brains, but in future, they’ll be about the heart.” It comes from Minouche Shafik, the Director of the London School of Economics. I love the quote because it is…
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Open-plan offices seem to be very popular. Part of the rationale for open-plan offices is that they aid teamwork and communications. It’s surprising, then, how many people who work in them, dislike them. Recently I was reviewing the work of an audit into a department where all its members work in a single open-plan office. […]
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I felt like I had stepped into another world … and in several ways, I had. Here I was, with my adult son, Ben, visiting us from Los Angeles, and both of us, albeit strangers, were being honoured and celebrated by strangers. We had come to Princes Park, the home of Dartford Football Club. Dartford […]
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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.
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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 […]
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“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. […]
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