The famous quote from Henry Ford “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses” tells us a great deal about leadership. Ford identified that the problem was not one of horse speed but of transportation. Not one of efficiency or productivity of the horse.…
In his book The Science Of Self Learning Peter Hollins looks at the future of learning. In the past we were told what to learn. A progression through school and university or college where facts were handed down from on high. Information was difficult to find and alternative views suppressed…
Our post Covid world has highlighted many possible advantages from changing work patterns but does work from home stop leadership development? In a recent article published in the Harvard Business Review entitled What Leadership Development Should Look Like In The Hybrid Era by Julia Birkinshaw, Maya Gudka and Steve Marshall…
Often the two traits are confused but it is important to understand why effective people are skeptics not cynics. A skeptic questions conventional wisdom and challenges the accepted view. Skepticism is a key part of all scientific investigation but has to be tempered with the honesty to acknowledge when the…
Top line income, be it sales or salary is meaningless, it’s not what you make, it’s what you keep. Effective businesses and individuals are not interested in sales figures or gross income but in net income after tax. Looking at top line figures is just plain silly. Which would you…
There’s very little difference between the two words but in the modern world, don’t digitise, digitalise. Digitising is converting your current systems, processes and data to digital. The move toward a paperless office involves digitising. Put another way the basic data is unchanged in content, just in form. This is…
Effective management is about continuous improvement and that’s why performance drivers really matter. It is very easy to get bogged down in the numbers. Actual v Budget, trends, forecasts, feed forward, feed back etc. etc. But effectively control the drivers and you effectively control the performance. This all began with…
Managing a business is hard and finding ways to make it easier is an attractive thing to do, that’s why bad managers love percentages. On many occasions we have discussed the fact that in order to be effective as an individual or an organisation you need a goal. Good managers…
Being effective means that you must adopt the best possible techniques to achieve your goal and here we see why digitalisation changes everything. In the past the only jobs that were at risk were those that could be automated. In other words those jobs that require repetitive and easily replicable…
If you read the accountancy books, assets and liabilities are very carefully defined, but when is an asset not an asset? I particularly like the definition of an asset in Robert Kiyosaki’s book Rich Dad, Poor Dad. In this book he clearly defines an asset as as “something that puts…