Calling Out the Gold in You

The Dream Manager

What are your dreams? Have you written them down? If not, why not? Perhaps, because we are taught not to value dreaming. We are told that dreaming is wasting time. Dreams are fantasy and will never happen. Dreams only set us up for disappointment. We are all wired to dream. All children dream when they […]

Keeping People in Frustrated Incompetence

As change leaders, we can have quite a high appetite for change. Yet, what is the effect on our customers of a perceived endless series of changes?

Range

I would recommend Range. It is one of the best books I have read so far this year. It explores a wide range of fields and topics from scientific research to athletic achievement to predicting engineering failure on spacecraft to education.

Did it fail because of the team?

… is it possible to go deeper and help individual team members engage with matters beyond their individual domains in positive ways? Specialists can show up to meetings as generalists, and they discover in a culture of honour and respect that they can engage with others with empathy and greater influence.

I felt hope draining out of the room

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 […]

Seeing through the mask

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 […]

Whatever you do, do it with all your heart

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…

Everybody wins

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 […]

Big Rocks

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.

Stepping over the dead bodies

“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 have fresh […]

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