Vulnerability and Helplessness are attributes not normally associated with the role of a Chief Executive. Perhaps they should be… My client, the CEO of a national charity, was becoming increasingly worn down by a situation that was fraying her nerves and making her feel weak and inadequate: I was getting more and more frustrated and anxious…
How the Big Issue that no one wants to talk about can strangle progress. A few years back I ran a Strategy workshop for a small, rapidly growing company. About 30 turned up – everyone, apart from Mike, the MD, who had deliberately stayed away so as not to inhibit the discussions in any way. The…
Strategies fail for many reasons, but the most insidious rarely gets a mention… There are, of course, lots of ways of derailing a corporate strategy: a regressive culture that resists change; poor planning; over-ambition; lack of ownership… feel free to add to the list. But a favourite of mine comes about through a blithe and…
There are a multitude of reasons why businesses don’t grow beyond a certain size – but one pops up time and again and that’s YOU. I’ve been lucky enough to talk to many business owners and managers over the past few years and the conversation often centres around growth, or the lack of it. Of…
If you’ve got Time Management issues, the problem isn’t Time Management. Years ago I went on a Time Management course and came away rather perplexed and demoralised by all the things I had to do to use my time effectively. I started to implement them regardless, keeping time logs, prioritising tasks, setting and keeping to…
Your business is like a pack of cards – are you missing any? OK, so this is about relating your business – any business – to a pack of cards. Not in a House of Cards way where the whole thing falls apart at the slightest nudge, but in a more subtle and profound way. In particular…
After years of attending all sorts of meetings in all manner of organisations, I reckon they all fall into 1 of 2 categories: Uplifting, constructive and energising Draining, life-sapping, boring, repetitive, ego-dominated, self-serving, bureaucratic, directionless, tedious, overlong, pointless, disengaging, demeaning, demotivating and time-wasting. Some meetings are just not worth holding – they do more harm…
The growing clamour to address gender inequality on boards misses the point. Here’s why: Bear Gryll’s Island adventure for wannabe castaways was an occasionally entertaining, if flawed experiment, enabling us to compare how men and women endure starvation, dehydration and extreme discomfort. Extreme in the context of the comfortable lives we live in the 1st world, that…
A client of mine recently told me about his friend who had been interviewed for a senior public sector appointment: a place on the board as a non-executive director. On stepping into the room, she was confronted by an interview panel of 20 people – that’s right, 20. Apparently she got the job, though why…
Why sticking with the facts will get you nowhere fast. First things first: Having made such an outrageous, contentious statement, I’d better get some caveats in quick before you all turn my post to shreds! Here we go: Facts are good. I like facts; I don’t know where we’d be without them. Spock was 1/2…
Coaching for Outcomes…or Insights? I’ve been coaching for over 15 years now and over that period I’ve familiarised myself with a number of coaching processes and methodologies, not to mention all those acronyms. I’ve noticed how many of these methods try to tie down the multitude of ways that you can approach coaching – some even attempting to…
I regularly work with boards and senior management teams on Strategy, which as far as I’m concerned, essentially means working out: where we are; where we want to get to; how we’re going to get there. It’s a deceptively simple challenge – simple, not necessarily easy. Occasionally, someone pipes up with: “Let’s talk about Values!” at which point…