Life Sentence
Steve decided that he wanted to redecorate his lounge, and wondered how many rolls of wallpaper he would need. He asked his neighbour Andy how many rolls he had bought. Andy said he bought 5 rolls of wallpaper, so Steve purchased 5 rolls too. When he had finished redecorating he found that had a roll left over entirely untouched ...
People quit people or position
I can’t count how many times I have heard people say they left an organisation because of what “they” did; it might be that John did this, or Jane did that, or a very popular reason is “they” offended me. Rarely, however, do “they” include the organisation ...
Tough Times and Turning Points
This turn of events also brought me to the start of a journey into a new season in my life and career. A transition from majoring on sales for other people and minoring on and training, to the new season where I am majoring on speaking, coaching and training and only engaging in sales for the newly formed “Leadership for Business”.
Time, and Life the Universe and Everything
We could consider each day to be like a fresh new cheque (or a new check in US currency) in a chequebook, and we can choose the value to write on that cheque. We can choose to have a lazy day and write a value of £10 for the day, or we can choose to have a really productive day and write £1,000 for the day.
Which mistake are you making?
I arrived at the conference a couple of days before it started, and one of my fellow coaches asked me what I was hoping to get out of this conference. My reply was to say; “I am hoping not to screw up on Monday”.
If it looks like a duck
The lesson here is that where something has all the characteristics of a thing, it probably is that thing, never mind what it is called or presented as, and despite the objective evidence to the contrary.
How're you doin'
We all see the conductor standing right there at the front of the sea of musicians waving his baton around, but what does he actually do? Well, the answer is that it’s something that the audience at a concert will rarely if ever see, but it has a massive impact on the performance of the orchestra.
Mind the gap
In leadership terms, it’s important to know where you’re going to, to define where you want to end up. Sometimes this is really quite obvious. When Kennedy stated “We choose to go to the Moon in this decade” on September 12 1962 it was really quite obvious where there was, and where here was. There was the moon, and here was the earth.If we don’t know where we are, we’ll not be able to chart the course to where we want to get to ...
What can I be best in the world at?
Having spent many enjoyable years engaged as a sales engineer and sales manager, it didn’t ever give me the rewards that I found from leading a training session where people learned something new and put that into practice. For a season I was both sales manager and training manager for a particular high ticket online secure database product, and I discovered that it was actually so much more rewarding to deliver the training to a new client than to make the sale!
Leaders are Listeners
Most people would agree that listening is an essential skill in life and business, yet so few seem to be skilled practitioners. In my line of business I spend quite a lot of time “networking” ...
Life Sentence
The Life Sentence exercise is a process of looking back over my life and career to identify the people, events, activities and circumstances that have most affected my life. It involved exploring the highs and the lows ...
Of course I’m a good driver, I’m a bloke
In recent years I have found myself thinking, “now that’s wasn’t such a good idea” when I’ve completed a manoeuvre, whether it was pulling out into a line of traffic and that enormous gap turned out to be rather smaller than I had anticipated ...
Defining Moments
When leaving higher education I had a choice to make between taking up the offer of a Commission as an Engineer Officer in the RAF, or staying with Michelin, the company that had sponsored me through University and paid all my education fees. This was a defining moment in my career ...
The toughest person to lead
When my mum was dating my dad she tells me that at social events anyone who didn’t enjoy a smoke was considered quite strange and really not socially engaged. Today however, that attitude seems to have been turned on its head. It seems that smokers are considered outcasts, condemned to spend part of their lives outside in any and all weathers.