In a somewhat desperate attempt at levelling the playing field between bossing and bossed, several businesses have recently announced that they will strip their top people of private office accommodation and make them sit at hot desks like everyone else. Avoiding wasting expensive office space is an admirable target. Levelling down is not. We educate…
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Even at the first smile that parents receive from their new-born baby, only minutes into the world, communication is all about engagement. It will continue to be so throughout their lives. For the next seven years it may be a matter of mother and father coaxing their instinctively wary child to face strangers. Quickly enough…
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You are intelligent, clear, brave and perceptive. You know your business or your specialisation well. You get along with people and think you are generally a good judge of them. You are confident, but well aware that if you are not learning every step of the way, you will soon fall behind others. You make…
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Not so long ago I met up with a former colleague. It’s more than thirty years since we worked together. We’ve kept in touch but I hadn’t seen him for a few years. We decided to lunch together. He is a truly splendid man. When diagnosed with a long-term disease over twenty years ago he…
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Before you can be an entrepreneur you need to be a few other things – alert, perceptive, curious, enthusiastic, brave, creative among them. You also need to be clear about what you want to achieve in life. No, you don’t need a plan for all your 100 years on earth. You couldn’t have one anyway.…
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Covid has brought us many problems, a few benefits, if we look for them, and a dig in the ribs about one subject in particular – authority. Never before in my lifetime has authority taken such a whacking. Partly due to the (sometimes wrongly) perceived incompetence of governments in dealing with the virus, partly because…
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This article was first published in Business Times on 15 January 2021 The first time I visited one of the smaller Cerebos factories I noticed a particular worker. He was about mid-fifties. There were sixty seven people in the factory but he stood out – even before I got to speak to him. Looking across…
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An increasing number of people are answering this question by getting started as the boss themselves. The majority, however, stick to the LinkedIn jobs ads and hope beyond hope to find a spot that is cool and comfortable. Alas, such spots are currently few and far between. The wages offered by them are often derisory…
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How can we prepare the next generation to handle the mind-bending changes that are taking place every day and every hour? Indeed, when is the next generation? Much faster than you think. Best to view it as ‘now’. So much technology involved in the way we live and work from today onwards. Bill Gates’s Magic…
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This article was first published in Business Times on 6 November 2020 Some businesses are having a rough time under Covid. In particular hospitality, travel, tourism, vehicle sales, retail shops, entertainment. Within each of these, there are good spots – home delivery, electric cars, private jets, for example – and some very bad ones. Routinely,…
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