Lessons from the Gruffalo

I read quite a lot – for work, for education and for pleasure.  Not as much in the last category any more, and less overall than I used to, but there are still a few fiction titles every year, usually in the “damn near brain-dead/guilty pleasure” category.  There are very, very few books that I read hundreds of times.  The Gruffalo is the only one this year.

It’s probably obvious that I have a young child – the Gruffalo isn’t a religious text, or a set of instructions for life.  But there are lessons in it, and the reading of it, just the same. Continue reading “Lessons from the Gruffalo”

Managing the squeaky wheel

If you’ve managed teams or organisations for a while, you know there’s invariably one.  The team member who gets categorised as “high-maintenance” or sometimes even “highly strung”. They are valuable members of the team, often solid engineers, technologists or other specialists, but they consume a disproportionate amount of your time as a manager.

So what can be done? Continue reading “Managing the squeaky wheel”

Decision and Discipline

Inertia is tough to overcome.  We become comfortable, and in becoming comfortable, we become less hungry, more steady state.  Energy comes from uncertainty and instability- channeling the energy leads to movement, hopefully in the right direction.

To begin channeling the energy, we have to first take a step; we need to make a decision to start. Continue reading “Decision and Discipline”

Time and Tide

It’s not news that Shakespeare had Marcus Brutus tell us that “There is a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood leads on to fortune…”, and that the failure to attend to the tide results in misery, and being forever doomed to the shoals of life.  Anyone who passes their time on the sea also knows the advantage of making the tide for a journey, or even for the most productive times for sea angling.

It’s equally not news that “time and tide wait for no man” – a quote attributed to Chaucer in the 1300s, but believed to have older roots.   There is a suggestion that the “tide” in the above quote refers to a season, rather than a nautical tide, but the intent is the same.  We can’t hold back the progression of the tide, the seasons, or  the clock.

Continue reading “Time and Tide”

Where the right things get done – at the intersection of Principles, Mission and Goals.

Peter Drucker writes in his book that doing the right thing is one of the primary attributes of the “Effective Executive“.  But how do we know that what we’re doing is the right thing at the right time?

In an ideal world, principles should inform and guide everything we do.  We can think of principles as a sort of operating system, the context in which we execute for our organisations.  To be principled has a moral, personal meaning, as in the OED definition: Continue reading “Where the right things get done – at the intersection of Principles, Mission and Goals.”

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