The Daily Paradox

The fun of creative leadership

You could be heading a large multinational organization – or a small division of one. You could be a commercial entrepreneur, a social entrepreneur, or the head of a government department. In today’s competitive workplace: A business leader has to be creative. The last 15+ years have seen organizations of all sizes focus on creativity…
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The Gloom Factor

It’s back to reality with a bump today. Not all is gloom and doom but if you want to look on the not-so-bright side for a moment consider the following facts. Some aspects of international trade are barometers of the world’s future economic health. Not perfect barometers but good enough to take notice. They stem…
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Singapore’s Fiftieth

Photo credit: Armando Nguyen Today is National Day in Singapore. We have National Day every year. This year is special. It is fifty years since Singapore achieved independence and the celebrations are planned to commemorate the event with all possible enthusiasm and gratitude. Our fireworks will not go off without a suitable glance backwards at…
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Thinking Time

Setting aside time to think is useless unless you know how to think. As our Solutions Society takes over more and more of our decisions it may be timely to remind potential and aspiring thinkers about how it is done. If this seems a bit like reinventing the wheel let me say that many clients…
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Questions are more than important

Anyone who has had small children to deal with knows that they learn instinctively by asking questions. So much so that their questions can become quite tiresome. The good parent never tires of answering them because they are the foundation of the child’s intellectual and moral code. It’s not just the answers either but how…
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Two rungs up the ladder

Clients who come to us for help invariably want to improve. They want to ‘do better’ at work, be more of a ‘success’ (in their own eyes and in the eyes of others), rack up the sort of achievements they see other people gazetting. It is wholly good to have these aspirations but they are…
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Employable, not Viable

This neat little phrase struck me the other day when I was talking to a representative of a leading American Business School. It seemed to sum up the output of many universities and business schools and I found that sad. Life is about viability, of which employability is a part, albeit an important one. But…
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