Does it ever feel like your organisation pays a mere lipservice to work/life balance? On a trip to Sydney to speak at a conference, I got into conversation with the chap in the next seat – John is a senior account manager for a very large multi-national firm and sells very high value products. We’d already done [...]
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Today we mourn the passing of a beloved old friend, Mr Common Sense. Mr Sense had been with us for many years. No one knows for sure how old he was since his birth records were long ago lost in bureaucratic red tape. He will be remembered as having cultivated such value lessons as knowing [...]
Do you find that interruptions are the constant companion of an open plan office? If you’ve been one of my ‘family’ of readers for a while, you’ll possibly already know my thoughts on unmoderated open plan environments, but in case you’re new, or missed my previous comments, here’s the snippet from‘Getting a Grip on the Paper [...]
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Some years ago I presented at a Johnson and Johnson New Leaders Forum in Auckland. One of the other speakers was Mick Yates, at the time a very senior executive with J&J Asia/Pacific. He’s now back in England and has one of the world’s top sites on leadership - http://www.leader-values.com/. This blog’s lead article is an excerpt [...]
Continue reading about What Can We Learn From Ghandi and Ghengis Khan? »
A very large international IT company asked for a course on ‘How to run effective meetings’. It was the weirdest session I’ve ever run; a brilliant example of how not to run meetings. The trouble was, the CEO had a different work ethic to the rest of the company. She’d been sent to Australia from the States to [...]
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Is it kind to make things easy for people? I put it to you that when we smooth the path too much we run the risk of short-term kindness becoming long-term cruelty, not only to the person we’re assisting, but often to ourselves. (I’m not talking about customer service here.) The consequences can be very [...]
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What do lawyers, accountants, quantity surveyors, consultants to many industries, secretarial services, project managers, government bodies, researchers and computer programmers have in common? Most of them hate to do time-sheets. If you’ve ever worked in a time-driven industry you’ll know that tight recording is absolutely critical or how would you know what to charge [...]
I’ve had a real wake up call. Twice in the last two weeks I have travelled to Australia to attend conferences on internet marketing with some of the world’s top experts. I realised I have been working in the online world for the last eleven years, and now it is time to take it to [...]
Sometimes it seems that time literally slips through our fingers. With the 2nd month of the year now unfolding lets look at a couple of the most common time management mistakes and how to stop them from stealing your precious hours: 1: Doing the easy things first! This little critter can suck the [...]
Not sure what you can delegate? Don’t know if you can afford it? Try writing down a list of all the regular tasks you do in a week, and estimate the amount of time spent on each activity. Now, pretend you’re paying someone a wage relative to each task, and put a dollar value beside [...]
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