In 2018 I had an offer to sell my consultancy to one of the big 4. It was very early in my entrepreneurship days and I was very flattered by the option. Even though the offer wasn’t life-changing, I was leaning towards selling.

Trust is a word that is everywhere in the workplace these days. We see it in company values, we hear it in meetings and we use it as a reason for things going or not going well in organisations. And for good reason!
Trust is a key foundation of cooperation; and in today’s world of work, you can’t achieve much without cooperation between people, departments and functions.

Recently I have been thinking about the word, legacy. A couple of things made me think about it.

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”.

Some time ago I went for a walk with a friend, and she mentioned that she had been listening to a podcast with Matthew McConaughey – the actor. The podcast reminded her of me and some of the ways I approach and think about business. The podcast was about his book Greenlights.

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.

The last few weeks I have been talking about these concepts of Subtle Leadership and Referent Power. Today I want to expand on the latter.

Last week I introduced the concept of Subtle Leadership as first coined by Luz E. Quiñones in her article from 2022, as a way of influencing others through “referent power”

For the last 9 years I have been leading an organisation that has grown into a “successful” business. I use inverted comas around successful because that can mean a lot of things to a lot of people.

For the last couple of weeks I have been talking about organisational structures and how they affect the culture of an organisation. I have shared how I feel organisations should put in place “continuous fluid structures" to achieve faster speed to market and agility to keep up with the pace of change in today's environment. 

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.

This week we said goodbye to one of our employees at Neu21. She has been with us for about two years, and, after this time, she has decided to pursue some other professional goals and projects.

This week I would like to touch on the causes that contribute to that busyness in organisations at individual level. Those things that we do to ourselves; us the humans that form part of those organisations.

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.”

Many of the executives and organisations we work with at Neu21 come to us because they realise they have a “culture problem”. However, the problem is that you can’t fix culture. Culture is like a shadow.