Mark Twain once said that if you eat a live frog first thing in the morning, you know that the rest of your day will be better because the worst is behind you. After all, you’ve already eaten a frog, what’s the worst that could happen?
Far too often we dread a task (Mark Twain’s frog), […]
My father, changed his career in his thirties, moving from a clerk of the court to train as a lawyer. He had a full working day, four children under seven and a requirement to take seven exams which had to be passed each year. Failing one exam meant a resit of all seven. As he […]
Only the foolish venture forward, without having a mentor supporting them, from behind the scenes. A mentor is normally someone older than you, wiser, with more grey hair, who knows something about what you are doing. In other words, it could be a retired CEO of the business, a retired board member who has known […]
Your email may be eating into your productivity. Here are some Golden Rules when managing your emails.
In any working week many of us are spending up to 20% of our time reviewing and processing emails. In many cases workflow is simply being pushed around the organisation for no tangible gain.
Here are some rules to save […]
Assuming that you know how to present the best side in the interview process, and there are myriads of articles on this topic, the important step is to avoid making a poor decision once you have been offered a new position
Do your homework
Make sure the next organisation is going to be a better fit, or […]
Far too many of us are caught firefighting all the time. Never getting enough time to plan to make the future a better place.
During an overseas speaking tour, I was with a good friend one Sunday afternoon, visiting a church fair. We had run out of things to do. Among the stalls was a person […]
The father of time management could be Stephen Covey. In his book “First thing’s first”, he observed that great leaders appear less stressed and seemed to have more time on their hands. He adopted the Eisenhower matrix which helps to sort tasks based on the principals of urgency and importance. When assigned to each task, […]
This is an extract from a book called ‘Don’t say I never told you’.
Create a story
Presentation planning
Last-minute slide presentations are a career-limiting activity. You would not hang your dirty washing in front of a hundred people, so why would you want to show your audience sloppy slides? Only say “yes” to a presentation if you have the time, […]
I consider abandonment as one of the most important gifts bestowed on us by Peter Drucker. It is unusual that such a profound concept should have been left unnourished by so many writers who followed in his footsteps. Amongst the overgrown and chaotic jumble within an organisation Drucker saw a clear pathway to freedom, innovation […]
The first circle in the diagram tells us to focus on an area where we can be a world expert. This is not as hard as it sounds, providing you look for a field specific to your experiences, where you have already made progress. Make sure it’s free from competing experts, then get your 10,000 […]