Creating Enlightened Organisations
I know you’re brilliant. You know you’re brilliant (even if sometimes you forget). But I would still be willing to bet that there are times when genuine productivity eludes you. When you just can’t seem to get going. Like wading in treacle. Or honey. When I was a kid, I hated mornings. Ask my Mum. … Read more Productivity: Finding Your Magic Hours
New Year is a time when many of us review the previous 12 months, and reflect upon our successes, and more often, the things that weren’t perfect. It is also the time we set goals and resolutions for the coming year. For perfectionists, this can be torturous. We can focus more on the gap between … Read more Nothing Is Perfect – But You Can Make It Better
“Supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.” ~ Sun Tzu The ‘festive’ season is typically associated with additional stress. There’s the usual suspects – money for example. Increased expectations for treats and gifts can make us feel overwhelmed by financial obligations and the knowledge that a debt tidal wave is likely to … Read more “Resistance is Futile!” – Holiday Survival Guide
“Coming together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is success.” ~ Henry Ford 2017 is drawing to an end… Along with my first nine months as a Blogger. As it were… my beginning. I thought it would be nice to pull together a list of the posts you read most in the … Read more 2017 Year in Review: The Beginning
“Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.” ~ Alan Perlis Two of the roles I had early in my career were in organisations with a macro-level view on systems: one was in the area of public sector management and the other was leadership – or at least public sector … Read more Complexity: Why Most Leadership Advice Is Wrong
“People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing – that’s why we recommend it daily.” ~ Zig Ziglar Just back from a week’s holiday in Sydney with our charming but wilful four-year-old… I’m not sure I have any oomph left. It feels like the run down to Christmas. Like I should be … Read more “What’s the Point?” – When Motivation Fails
“Iron rusts from disuse; water loses its purity from stagnation… even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind.” ~ Leonardo da Vinci The english language intrigues me… perhaps never more so when two idioms that strictly speaking say the same thing, mean the exact opposite. In a recent poll on this site, a … Read more In the Groove… or Stuck in a Rut? Avoiding Stagnation
“Any emails that contain the words ‘important’ or ‘urgent’ never are, and annoy me to the point of not replying out of principle.” ~ Markus Persson You know the feeling. You’ve overcome your procrastination… You’re fed and hydrated… You’ve put your social media well out of arm’s reach… You are about to start that important … Read more Urgent Versus Important: Playing Corporate Whack-a-Mole
“Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.” ~ Martin Luther King, Jr. The world is full of challenges and issues and problems. Every day on the news, in our social media feeds, and in our conversations with colleagues and family and friends, we are confronted by the things … Read more Just Get Started: The First Step is Always the Hardest
“Days are expensive. When you spend a day you have one less day to spend. So make sure you spend each one wisely.” ~ Jim Rohn I’m not sure I truly appreciated time until I had a child. I’ve always been ambitious and impatient to accomplish things quickly, but there’s nothing quite like waking up … Read more Time Management: Make the Most of What You’ve Got
In a bit of a departure from our usual discussions, I want to give you a sneak peak at my upcoming eBook Get Influential: How I built a Twitter following of 5,000 in under five months and how you can too. In the process of building an engaged community of leadership enthusiasts, I have learned … Read more “Get Influential” Your Guide to Building a Twitter Following
People often ask me about the books I read. Specifically, they want to know what leadership books I’d recommend – there are so many! Usually I try and curate a list on the spot based on what I know about the person who is asking, but I almost always miss something. There are already lots of “Leaders’ … Read more 5 Books you Must Read if you Consider Yourself a Leader
“New Year’s Eve is a great time to think about making a resolution to change a behavior, improve upon a practice, or to start something new. Most people don’t keep their resolutions very far into the year, but there’s no reason to wait until Dec 31st to reboot” ~ Dana Perino No matter what sort … Read more Reboot: How to Get Going when you’re Stuck
“We have more possibilities available in each moment than we realize” ~ Thich Nhat Hanh My local bookshop, Unity, has to be one of my favourite places in the whole world. Small enough to be personal, but big enough to have so many books and choices I’ll never run out of options to browse. I’ve … Read more Possibilities: Why I Love Books (and Journals)
“Much of the stress that people feel doesn’t come from having too much to do. It comes from not finishing what they’ve started.” ~ David Allen I’ve been reflecting on how much I’ve taken on. Of my own doing, of course, but commitments none-the-less. This week is particularly busy at work – largely responsibilities that … Read more Overcome Overwhelm: Managing Work-related Stress
“The essence of procrastination lies in not doing what you think you should be doing, a mental contortion that surely accounts for the great psychic toll the habit takes on people. This is the perplexing thing about procrastination: although it seems to involve avoiding unpleasant tasks, indulging in it generally doesn’t make people happy” ~ … Read more Procrastination: Is it your Kryptonite?
I’ve just had three days out of action with a particularly nasty head-cold. (It’s winter right now in my part of the world.) And while I really wanted to get in front of my computer and slog out something helpful for all of you fabulous people – I knew I wasn’t leading if I wasn’t … Read more Self Leadership: Take Care of You First
Meetings might well be the single biggest time-sink in any medium to large size organisation, with the possible exception of email. There have been times in my career – especially in times of crisis/semi-crisis or when deadlines are looming – that I have literally reached a Friday afternoon and realised that I feel like I … Read more Top 10 Tips to Create Mindful Meetings that Matter
How can you be busy and lazy at the same time? You can’t? You bet you can! The best example I’ve come across for this was on a big IT project I was involved in. Projects that are formally/mechanically managed are fairly typical in IT and construction. Project management provides a set of tools and … Read more When Busy-ness Hides Laziness
It is simply a fact that, in general, human beings naturally prefer to take the shortest, simplest, easiest path between two points. You could even say, laziness defines us. At school, the majority of students find the easiest (least effort) way to get the results they want. Not only academically, but also in terms of … Read more Laziness: The Human Condition?