I have a confession to make. I have been running a business for the last 10 years and have not done a (traditional) business plan. Ever. Not at the start; not every five years; not every year. Never.

There is a word that expresses perfectly, what is possibly the most important quality leaders need to master for themselves, and for the teams and organisations they lead these days. That word is liminality. 

In a world where pretty much everything and everyone is measured and valued by how much you have financially grown from year to year; I have been wondering how all those business owners and executives may be feeling right now. This made me think of “Growth”.

I have played basketball most of my life. One of the plays that I have always enjoyed is the fastbreak…

A few years ago, I was lucky to be given the opportunity to lead a Contact Centre for a well-known progressive digital organisation in Melbourne, and I was given carte blanche to challenge some of the myths and preconceptions around Contact Centres.

It is that time of the year again (at least in Australia), where the financial year ends on the 30th of June. It is the time of the year when most organisations and managers are scrambling to finish the dreaded “annual performance reviews” that will dictate the “bonuses” and salary increases for millions of employees.

Last week I spoke about how the alternative was to have a “continuous fluid structures” and when I was thinking about how to explain this, I remembered an episode from Ted Lasso, season 2

If you look at an org chart from 1886, you may be surprised that it looks exactly the same as many org charts in 2024. There is a big box at the top and then lines that cascade to a few smaller boxes underneath and those have more smaller boxes underneath and so on.

The way I think about busyness is at two levels: organisational level and personal / human level. Let’s explore first the organisational one, and next week we will explore the personal human one. What are the things that contribute to that busyness trap in organisations at a systematic level?

I see many organisations wasting a lot of time and effort trying to predict the future. It seems like predicting the future give those organisations some sort of (false) sense of comfort. 

I think it was the American psychiatrist George Vaillant who said: “there are two pillars of happiness in life. One is love; the other is finding a way of coping with life that does not push love away.”