What is the point of having a purpose for your career when coronavirus, AI, climate chaos or isolationism may forcibly steer you away from it at any moment? How can a purpose be relevant for more than a few days or weeks when such cataclysmic change threatens us all the time? What Is a career,…
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There will be a slight pause in the Daily Paradox for which I apologise. I have to have a replacement valve inserted into my heart and this will take a few weeks for recovery from the operation. I will try to keep up the occasional DP while this is going on but if I don’t…
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Your whole life is a deadline – the word itself is an accurate description. From the moment of birth you have, or are expected to have, aspirations to learn, to acquire basic knowledge – even with the world of Google at your fingertips – to grow, to contribute, to succeed. By the age of seven,…
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We all know the superstars of sport, of politics, of business. They are lauded by the media, worshiped by their followers, applauded – not always enthusiastically – by their employees. They are ridiculously overpaid, pampered and spoiled at the start, then hounded, derided and, not infrequently, imprisoned at the end. You don’t have to be…
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The Chancellor of the Exchequer (Finance Minister) of Britain is said to be about to commit a very stupid and dangerous act. He will ask British voters for suggestions as to how the country might deliberately diverge from or abandon EU rules and regulations. He’s apparently calling it “The Brexit Red-tape Challenge”. Idiot. Doesn’t he…
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When I worked in a big food and drink conglomerate I noticed that there were Acquirers and Divestors among the members of the board and senior management. I was an Acquirer, perhaps the most enthusiastic. And there weren’t many of us by the time I joined the company. There had been. The previous Chairman had…
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In his Financial Times article Martin Wolf says “After Brexit Britain won’t be lonely, just lonelier”. As always, he gets to the heart of the matter. Britain remains part of the world. British Government still has to decide the affairs of state for the country. The European Union is still there and Britain needs to…
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Early in my career I discovered that a MERGER could be spelt MURDER if you were not careful. The massive Food and Beverage business for which I worked employed around 145,000 people, mostly in the British Isles. That made them big acquirers – but not always successful ones. In fact, they had acquired an average…
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The weight of information available and the mountain of analytics potentially to hand will change the C-suite’s requirements and behaviour more than we have yet imagined. For the past three decades business has struggled to prevent EI getting a serious hold on how companies are run. The attitude was summed up for me twenty years…
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The Bell of Success isn’t Big Ben shattering people’s peace for a deft political move. It isn’t a giant cup brimming over with champagne after a well-earned tournament. It isn’t an array of cloth and caps to herald a new Newton or a chiming Chain; nor a proclamation that you are made Chief. The bell…
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