Thoughts

Towards the end of 2020, I worked with one of New Zealand’s highest profile public sector executive teams. In the year that was, the CEO and the organisation had been under the pump and was in the media spotlight for most of the year. They were keen to reflect and review how they’d led during […]

Want to make change happen? Wondering how to make it easier? Great. Here’s an approach to do just that. Now is a good time to make change happen. This is a time of great unlocking, as I’ve written about in my chapter in Julia Steel’s recently published book Unite. Many of the rules and assumptions […]

  I’ve been trawling the archives of the past eight years of my blog posts, and I came across this little piece that I think is just as relevant today as when I first wrote it back in 2013. So I’m sharing it again now in the hope that its message gets you thinking about […]

“Any idiot can face a crisis. It’s the day-to-day living that wears you out” – Anton Chekhov   Over the past week or so, as COVID-19 has paid another visit to New Zealand’s shores, I’ve noticed how many leaders have yet again gone into the ‘Covid-mode’ of leadership. ‘Covid-mode’ is all about reacting to problems. […]

    “…there is no energy unless there is a tension of opposites…” Carl Jung   Living life well, and doing leadership well, doesn’t come that easy, right? I think one of the reasons is that, if we’re truly leaning into it, we face tensions everywhere we turn. Those tensions that arise because we’re faced […]

Back in March 2020, as the world plunged into Covid craziness, I wrote Now Is The Time To Lead. Here we are in July 2020, and now is still the time to lead. The world is ripe for positive change, and the opportunity to reshape it is right in front of us all. As my […]

I was on the train last week, heading into the CBD. As we pulled into Wellington station, the lady sitting next to me caught my eye. She launched into a mini-rant about racism and how she couldn’t believe we hadn’t solved this problem yet. “It’s the 21st century! We should have this sorted by now, […]

You know what’s better than building things up in your imagination? Building things up in real life. – Ryan Holiday, The Obstacle is the Way   This period of lockdown has given us a golden opportunity to ask ‘what do we want? For ourselves, for our organisations, and for society. Personally, I’ve become really energised […]

I’ve just spent a couple of weeks in Japan with my family and some good friends. I’d never been to Japan before, and the culture was totally new to me. As we landed, I was filled with a mix of excitement and apprehension. I’d heard plenty of stories about the challenge of finding your way […]

Over the summer break, I’ve managed to get through a good number of books. The topics cover leadership, organisational culture, the future of work, identity and purpose – all things I’m thinking about right now. I reckon these books are all useful, thought-provoking reads for any leader, change-maker or restless go-getter who’s searching for inspiration […]