Exploring why and how we do what we do, and how we can do it better
I was thinking today as I ran about what happens when we think about tasks/ actions/ challenges. For a while I ve been thinking about how I need to create as shallow an on-ramp (like a ramp into a carpark or motorway?) as possible to tasks. Rather than having the action to do and building up [ ]
Well, if you re not, you should be. The power of the human imagination is still relatively little researched. Productivity literature, parents and teachers ask us to focus on the task in hand and our project plans. Yet we know through our human history that it has been the big thinkers that have enabled our faster [ ]
During a talk I gave I was asked about the key lessons that I have learnt from running several businesses. I feel hardly qualified to answer, but I am very clear on a number of aspects: The cost of understanding your product/service has to be less than the immediately obvious benefit that comes from using your [ ]
Focus on the wildly important Create a compelling scoreboard Translate lofty goals into specific goals Hold each other accountable all the time From Execution
Five key business lessons that could serve to help entrepreneurs and other innovators as they look to the coming decade: 1. Look for disruptive change. As you are about to start a new venture, ask yourself these questions: What is becoming possible or necessary that wasn’t possible before? Is a new product or service able [ ]
are absolutely two different things. I was talking with one of my client senior managers with the widest span of responsibility yesterday. They re coping with a lot of the things that leaders have to. I started to explain things in terms of suspending a balance between the following areas of accountability as a leader and manager: [ ]
Taking a bit of a flyer on this one. Not particularly thought through, but it struck me in preparation for a talk entitled The Science of Happiness. In a line from Daniel Nettle s great book Happiness, The Science behind your Smile he states happiness, though, is not calculated by a simple summing up of all the [ ]
Back to the game playing idea, I read an interesting article in the Times loosely based around Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein s book Nudge. Thaler and Sunstein demonstrate how thoughtful “choice architecture” can be established to nudge us in beneficial directions without restricting freedom of choice . They suggest how accepting our peopleness and suggesting rather [ ]
Satisficing is defined as a decision-making strategy which attempts to meet criteria for adequacy, rather than to identify an optimal solution Wikipedia. It is a blend of words: satisfy and suffice. Most tasks tend to expand to fill the time that we give to do them. I started thinking about whether satisficing could help [ ]
Just something that occurred to me today as I was taking a note of what one of me client senior managers had said to me that I wanted to learn from. How many leaders and managers consciously look to learn from their teams? How many are both open to the fact that they could learn [ ]