The eternal search for clarity, and why it is so hard.
Clarity: “clearness or lucidity as to perception or understanding; freedom from indistinctness or ambiguity”. The one thing we all seem to want, yet few of us ever have. If I was to tell you that in the 6 years I have been helping people change and grow their careers, that this is the one thing […]
The puzzle that keeps getting bigger
About 6 years ago I hit the eject button on my corporate career. After decades of making my career my life, I had finally hit a wall and needed a change. To what though? I can honestly say – I had no plan, not much saved for the ‘rainy day’ that had unexpectedly arrived, and […]
Queenstown’s new gold
I moved to Queenstown, New Zealand about a year ago and was excited to join this small creative bustling community of just 17,000 people. The smallest town I have ever lived in – it was sure to serve me some lessons, and I was curious. Queenstown (Maori: Tahuna) sits in one of the most beautiful […]
Change your Job Description to Designer – Here’s How.
It is a reasonably well understood truth, that designers have a unique ability to create new value, and solve problems – often problems we didn’t even know we have. Remember when you first experienced say, highlighter pens? Or text messaging? How did the designers of those products and services know that pretty much everyone would need what they […]
In the New ‘World of Work’, it’s Time for Human Innovation.
It’s hard to imagine a time when the concept of ‘a job’ has ever gone through so much revolutionary change. Back in the early 1900’s, people campaigned and worked hard to get what was a 48hour standard working week – scaled back to 40 hours. And so by the 1940s we had a legal precedent set […]
You Can’t Be an Agile Business, if You Don’t Enable Agile People.
I still remember it like it was yesterday. The first time I attended a Design Thinking workshop was in Auckland in 2012 with the tutors from Stanford D-School. I was fresh off a boat from London having left my job in banking about 3 weeks earlier, to return to NZ to start work as Director of […]
How to Unleash Your Organisations Latent & Unique Creativity.
The world around us is full of all kinds of opportunities for creativity, everyday. There are an increasing number of new problems to solve, and inventions to create. Most of us will – on a daily basis – have new ideas for things to fix or put right. Yet how many of us act on those […]
It’s Coming. Actually It’s Here. Are You Ready?
Can you feel it? It seems to be everywhere and all around us. The groundswell – a rising tide of expectation and anticipation about our work – both what we do, how we are working, and the impact we can have. Groundswells are great – they bring with them a sense of excitement, but also fear. […]
‘House of Beautiful Business’: in a World of Machines, Human Authenticity is the Ultimate Business Differentiator.
I set off to Portugal this month to visit the House of Beautiful Business 2019 in Lisbon. It’s best described as a series of ‘salons’ curated by the incredibly curious and creative Till Grusche, Monika Jiang and Tim Leberecht, with a purpose to bring to those who attended insight into what it will take to build truly beautiful businesses of the […]
Lessons from the crisis front line, on leading for today.
I still remember how it felt. Waking up on 12 September 2001, in my bosses apartment in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. I was sleeping on a very small couch, in an office, surrounded by paper, a fax machine, and my ‘list’. There was a dusty hue to the sky and a stale smokey smell […]
What can we learn from Socrates? The lifelong pursuit of character; in a year that matters.
Tonight I had the pleasure of joining one of the Aeara Foundations: Wiser Conversations, hosted by the remarkable Derek Handley, and guest Dr Edward Brooks from the Oxford University Character Project. The headline of the talk was “Conscious Character Building”. I don’t know about you, but I doubt there has ever been a year when my character has been […]
Want to change your path in life? Live like a lion tracker.
I was fortunate tonight to join the Wiser Conversation hosted by Derek Handley, and be part of an illuminating interview with Boyd Varty – a Lion Tracker, a Storyteller, and a Life Guide. But he’s not your average life coach – actually not your average human. A wildlife and literacy activist Boyd is also an acclaimed author of Cathedral of […]
