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Let go of the good
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It’s budget time again – how’s yours going? Do your budget conversations sound at all like your strategy conversations? In my experience, they don’t....
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Have you ever opened your calendar, only to see nothing but other people’s priorities staring back at you? Take a look at it now and see what the...
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There’s a common cliché about working parents—we’re expected to perform our jobs as though we don’t have children and parent as though we don’t have...
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People are stupid when it comes to risk. For one thing, we don’t understand risk in our personal lives. We grossly overestimate our chances of...
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I’ve been a productivity nerd since day one. So much so, that I spent the summer between my first and second year at university reading books about...
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I ran a Strategic Focus workshop with a group last month, and one of the participants alerted me to the most beautiful quote: “The past is a foreign...
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Last week, I wrote about how to get people interested in your strategy and change initiatives and the importance of being real and using plain...
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If I met anyone from your senior leadership team in the lift, and asked what your strategy is – how many different answers would I get? It’s hard to...
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What do you do for work?” Gulp. When you work for the government, sometimes it’s tempting not to tell people. Primarily if you work in local...
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Collaboration that actually SAVES time and money?! Some years ago, I had a job writing tender responses for large construction and infrastructure...
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Have you ever achieved more in an hour than you managed the rest of the week? I have. I get a serious case of what I call “travel clarity” – I can...
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Remember Pokemon Go? What a sensation! Blowing up from what felt like nowhere, Pokemon Go was the third most popular app download in 2016, behind...
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Every time I walk into a workshop with a new group, I have a job to get out of the way: establish credibility and generate interest. Is this partly...
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I ran a programme with the senior leadership team at Christchurch City Council about five years ago. One thing I noticed about how GMs communicated...
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Have you ever caught the show Undercover Boss? It’s just the kind of brilliant mind-numbing reality TV you need for a sick day in bed – which is how...
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Man, do I love the smell of a fresh year. Crispy new stationery, damp summer evenings, long days and warm nights. It’s hard not to feel excited about...
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I had dinner with a colleague in Melbourne last month, who proclaimed at one point that “time is meaningless. It’s simply a human construct to...
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Strategy needs space. Time, headspace, and physical space. I’ve just returned to New Zealand after a few days of professional development in...
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Have you ever heard that old saying: “Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t”? I’ve had a jampacked few weeks facilitating strategy...
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I received a great message over the weekend that made my day. I’d just had a total fail of an attempted trail run, and I was feeling all dark and...
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I used to work with this chick that drove me mental. Let’s call her Vicki. She was the perennial victim – you know the type, had something new to...
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There’s a parenting meme doing the rounds that really hit me in the feels recently. It goes “One day I’ll be happy my daughter is an independent,...