Monthly Archives: November 2011

Nothing prevents astronomical achievement quite like marginal success

Posted on November 29th, 2011

I love this comment by Missing Link‘s Rich Mulholland in his comment on a recent blogpost: Nothing prevents astronomical achievement quite like marginal success. I love it because it’s a simple statement that contains a very deep truth. We all aim to be successful and those dreams we dream when we start out tend to [...]

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It’s okay if they hate you sometimes

Posted on November 27th, 2011

Consultative, involved leadership has its benefits. Including people in the grand adventure you lead them on, gets buy-in and can bring out the best in people as they assume a mindset of responsibility and accountability. There’s a reason that it’s becoming popular. But there are times when you have to simply make decisions that not [...]

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Wish for wisdom and courage, not for things

Posted on November 25th, 2011

Few things matter more than having the balls to take a stand and the contextual knowledge to back it up.  One without the other is pretty useless; balls without knowledge is mere cockiness and knowledge without balls condemns you to slavery to anyone cockier than you. And yet I’m reminded of a story I read [...]

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Why I don’t believe in leading from behind the scenes

Posted on November 18th, 2011

There was a day when wars were fought with the leader out front alongside the troops. Napoleon Bonaparte earned fanatical loyalty from his men partly because when the air was full of gun smoke, he’d be right there, doing whatever was necessary, from loading canon balls – the job of a corporal – to firing [...]

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It’s what you’re doing right now that counts

Posted on November 13th, 2011

Many years ago, an American colleague put it to me that a central difference between US East Coast thinking and US West Coast thinking is that in the east, they’re fascinated by where you went to college, where in the west, they care only about what you’re working on right now. It’s not really that [...]

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You have to DO, to understand

Posted on November 12th, 2011

The very brilliant Henrik Edberg from The Positivity Blog posted a great set of Confucianisms during the week which has had me thinking long and hard. Confucianisms are the butt of many jokes because the concept of the wise old Chinaman parodies so well in our western way of thinking. But the jokes hide a sincere [...]

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The reason brilliant ideas so often die

Posted on November 5th, 2011

We are a follow-your-dreams society in the western world, and perhaps further afield too. In fact, with the exception of the one billion starving people on Earth, for the most part, we’ve got it pretty good. And it leads many of us to imagine that we can have it even better if we could just [...]

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The easiest way of all to stand out

Posted on November 3rd, 2011

One key to success that keeps coming up time and time again, the more I read up on, and study the subject, is that of being proactive. Getting out and doing something before you’ve even got a business case for it, because you really want to get it done. There are several reasons for this: [...]

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