A monkey with a dartboard
One of the things that ground me down about being employed was the number of pointless things I was asked to do. I don’t mean speculative things which came to nothing: my short attention span enjoyed...
View ArticleChange management as Xmas cake
Jamie Oliver is the author of the fastest selling non-fiction book in the history of UK publishing. Whether you regard this as a sad comment on the decline of intellectual life or a positive statement...
View ArticleSocial media and Mars Bars
The thinking man’s recruiter, @mervyndinnen chatted with me in the pub about sixties Britain the other evening. We weren’t far from Carnaby Street so it felt right, but his point was about something...
View ArticleCavalier or Zen?
I was talking to a psychiatrist the other day (I was working, she wasn’t). She talked to me about the idea that clinical skills are a ‘scientific art’, in other words good clinicians are able to apply...
View ArticleBusy little bees
When I first started working on my own I spent a few weeks wondering if I was unwell. When I was employed, a day in the office would see me arrive somewhere around 8:00 or 8:30 and work my day before...
View ArticleDon’t worry about your career
One of my favourite books of 2010 was Sarah Bakewell’s ‘How to Live. A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer’. Equal parts biography, history and philosophy, it distils the...
View ArticleEngaged? Let’s get married
I’ve had a couple of conversations about staff engagement in the last couple of days. Both with prestigious organisations; both will well-intentioned and apparently clever HR people. Both conversations...
View ArticlePay attention
This post is one in a series where I’m going to take each of Sarah Bakewell’s twenty attempts at Montainge’s answer to the question ‘how to live’ and re-interpret them as an answer to the question ‘how...
View ArticleBring your emotions to work
This post is one in a series where I’m going to take each of Sarah Bakewell’s twenty attempts at Montainge’s answer to the question ‘how to live’ and re-interpret them as an answer to the question ‘how...
View ArticleOrganising versus reorganising
Charles Handy quotes an old joke about a stranger asking directions in rural Ireland. Stopping a passer-by in the street, the visitor describes his intended destination and is met with a puzzled look....
View ArticleStabbed with a Silver Spoon
A friend drew my attention to this article from Stuart Marconie in the New Statesman the other day. For those that don’t know him, Stuart is an intelligent and witty music journalist and his...
View ArticleBoundless Curiosity
I found this article the other day from Diane Coyle (@diane1859). She points to a 1959 controversy sparked by CP Snow’s observation about a preference in English education for Humanities over Sciences...
View ArticleThe price of everything, the value of nothing
Writing in the FT this weekend, food writer Tim Hayward identifies the subtle feelings provoked when quality restaurateurs outsource parts of their production. It reminded me of a conversation I had in...
View ArticleManners matter
I usually open doors for people. My mum brought me up to be disciplined about saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’. My emails generally start with a friendly greeting and end with an appropriate sign-off:...
View ArticleWhy leadership development is broken and one thing you might do about it
When my children went to primary school, I recognised some of the input they were receiving from my first management development course ten years previously. By the time they were in secondary school...
View ArticleMy Dad has the worst job in the world
It’s a couple of years ago now that I was sharing a beer in the evening sunshine with a leadership development group in Lisbon. One of the delegates, Jose, told a story of how his small son had...
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