Thoughts

Here’s how I take an idea and turn it into a useful post. Let’s take my recent post Opportunity and Agency This one started as a random idea in a lecture I was giving for my Auckland MBA cohort. During the class discussion, the idea came to me, so I drew it up on the […]

Recently I was working with a group of about 20 people at a residential workshop. It was morning tea time and we were all gathered in a room relishing our caffeine top-ups. As facilitator, it was my job to keep people on time. I considered how I’d let them all know when it was time […]

When I was about 14 years old, I joined my school’s Army Cadet corps. It was attractive because I’d heard they did cool things out in the bush. I was having a bit of a hard time at boarding school, and I thought it would a great respite. It wasn’t what I expected. The rule-bound […]

  Lurking in our language, there’s a number of naughty words that we have conveniently categorised as “Four Letter Words”. You know what I’m talking about. Most of us typically utter these offensive tones to express our dislike of something, or someone. If you’ve ever been the unlucky “someone” on the receiving end of such […]

How valuable are you to your organisation? Or to your clients? You must add some value, right? Otherwise why would they hire you? In a disruptive, fast-moving world, what’s valued today is less likely to be the same as what’s valued tomorrow. Consider the plethora of evidence out there to show us that the jobs […]

A lot of people say that networking is hard, and they’re not good at it. And, we know (or at least, we hear) that a healthy network is good for us. So there’s this tension that we live with. If you’re one of those people feeling that tension, let me help you ease the pain. […]

  Late in 2015, I published ‘Three Things I’ve Learned This Year’. The most popular of those three with readers was the idea of ‘Be The Flower, Not The Bee’. In essence, strive less. I’m going to build on that idea here by showing you how to see and work with patterns to be more […]

Before you check out for the year (at least in the southern hemisphere, where summer holidays beckon!), now’s a good time to reflect on what you’ve learned in the past 12 months. You’ve come a long way since January. What has living another year taught you? Here are three things I’ve learned this year: Experiment […]

This morning, driving through Wellington’s hilly terrain, I was playing ‘I-spy’ in the car with my eight-year-old son. He was trying hard to guess my word starting with ‘H’. After a few attempts (“Head”, “hands”, “horrible monsters…”) I decided to give him a clue: “They’re outside, and we are surrounded by them”. After a few […]

Last week, I was invited, along with a number of others, to a lunch meeting to help out a colleague who was looking for fresh ideas on where to take her career. The conversation was lively and engaging, and my colleague came away with a plethora of new ideas – in fact, way more than […]