Thoughts

  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 […]

    “…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 […]

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 […]

Too many people seek out stuff that actually doesn’t matter that much. And that seeking stops them from playing a bigger game.

In the last post, we discovered that giving permission to be curious is essential.  Now we’ll have a look at the next P: Purpose.   “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men and women to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders.  Instead, teach them to yearn for the […]

“May you live in interesting times. May you live in an interesting age. May you live in exciting times.” This phrase purportedly has it’s origins in China.  Over the past couple of hundred years, its popularity in the western world has tended to peak whenever the world goes into turmoil. I think it’s fair to […]

  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 […]

  A man sits down at a piano and prepares to play. When he starts, it’s not what you might expect. Take a few moments to go on this musical and emotional journey with Eric Lewis. You don’t need to watch the whole thing if you don’t have time – just a few minutes will […]

I’ve been working with a lot of clients lately who all seem to be in a similar space. Work is just crazy, and won’t let up. It’s not merely ‘busy’ – it’s something more. It’s not just a volume problem, it’s a complexity problem, and navigating a way forward is harder than ever. As someone […]

Over the past two weeks, I’ve been fortunate enough to work with some talented managers in both London and Shanghai. They’re all facing a major business change in the form of a system implementation which will significantly alter their core business processes and keep them competitive. Think of it like when banks moved to online […]