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Poetry at Work.
Last week lone-sailing Seascape, my 12 foot, clinker-style dinghy; hushed breeze rushing, bow splashing and wake boiling, I slipped and sliced, suspended on chrome-smooth sky-tinted surfaces, ruffled,...
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Will 2010 Be As You Like It?
‘All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players” says Bill Shakespeare’s character Jacques in As You Like It, Act II Sc vii, To what story, what climax, what denouement have you...
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Slow motion serendipity
Several weeks ago in Poetry at Work I contemplated the jolting transition from profoundly poetic to harshly prosaic. Then suddenly I plunge into turbid work-waters, seeking uncontrived rhyme, rhythm,...
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The hidden cost of employee commitment.
The cost, especially in economic upturn, is the loss of your best employees: the ones you didn’t make redundant; those that stuck with you despite your anxious, distracted, terse, unreasonableness and...
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99.9% of the time a miracle will happen
99.9% of the time a miracle will happen – says a mathematician acquaintance.Trouble is, 99.8% of the time we don’t see, don’t recognise, don’t make room for miracles, little or big – too driven by...
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In step with Management.
Left, right, left, right, left. Is good management Left or Right? Neither ‘of course’. Management is apolitical! Right? Management objectively, dispassionately maximises value for shareholders. In a...
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Are you crazy?!
You’re a senior executive under pressure. You sense things are getting out of your control. Things are going wrong unexpectedly despite all your strategic planning, focused KPI’s, and reporting...
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How to be understood
Rule # 1: expect to be misunderstood. Mostly, we assume that understanding is normal. Wrong. Ask any spouse, sibling, parent, or lover. Successful service-sales and service-delivery people for...
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Why good people behave badly in organisations
We behave badly because we’ve been trained to behave badly from about age 11 in industrial education processes for industrial work. We’re imprinted with that classroom model of authority, hierarchy,...
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Ten truths of leadership
Of course there’d have to be ten, not nine or 13 or a Tom-Peters list of around 37. Ten is nice and neat; makes a tidy package; one tattoo for the back of each finger to remind us as we type our...
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The Restructure Ritual
I found out from my hairdresser why corporates continually restructure: it’s a ritual!I saw the writing on the wall while I was lying back having my shampoo and colour. Kerastase, Paris offers range...
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WANTED: Communication educators for management revolution
Being able to collaborate better than the competition is gold in today’s globally competitive market: the most valuable differentiator; the greatest competitive advantage a firm can have; hard to copy...
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Communication compulsory in only 50% of NZ undergraduate Business degrees...
Research by Sandra Barnett & Susan O'Rourke, published in the December 2010 issue of the Communication Journal of New Zealand, shows that although employers want graduates skilled in communication,...
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What is & what produces organisational health?
The GFC highlighted that what we measure, for organisational health, determines what we get. As Colin Price, Director, McKinsey & Company, puts it in his Dec 14 2010 blog on MIX: “Focusing...
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The rare joy of collaboration at work and how to get it.
For me, one of the biggest joys summer holidays is collaborative living: together engaging in expeditions, construction projects, food preparation, and eating all organised through conversation; a...
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And the forecast is: Wrong
The Business Herald in the New Zealand Herald this morning (Friday 25 Feb 2011) features an edited extract from Dan Gardner's new book "Future Babble". In the excerpt Gardner writes mostly about how...
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Measuring a “pound of flesh”
TEU’s Nigel Haworth is probably right to pejoratively call University of Auckland VC, Stuart McCutcheon a Managerialist. In this latest stoush with the Tertiary Education union McCutcheon claims the...
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How to Radically Change Business Teaching and Learning
Public education is failing to produce people skilled at collaborating in enterprise; at bringing their particular strengths and passions together to collaboratively, dramatically exceed the...
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Who do you think you are?
Who you think you are is affected by the context you’re in and it affects the behaviour of those around you. Who you think you are at work is affected by your assumptions about what your work role...
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Manager or Leader: red-herring
Should bosses be managers or leaders? Is there a difference? Can leaders be managers? Can managers be leaders? Whatever, it’s irrelevant. The debate’s a red herring. It was maybe relevant in...
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