Bite Size Business Tips

Bite Sized Business Tips

Quick reads for the values-led business leader about meeting our responsibilities to our team, customers, owners, communities and suppliers. We strongly believe that context is everything for high level leadership, so don't take these as dogma, but simply to stimulate thought.

If you can’t change the world, change yourself

Do we take offence, or do we change things? Or do we do both? There’s a lovely parable in Buddhist tradition. To walk in a world of thorns, we could remove all the thorns or cover every inch with leather. Or we can wear leather sandals. Many of our current ...
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The hype cycle on remote working

Headlines like to paint an extreme. So remote working is either our saviour, or the start of our demise. And the reporting has followed an accelerated form of Gartner's hype cycle. The hype told us that working remotely was all good - less commuting, more family time, greener planet. And ...
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Have your kids influenced your business?

Next week, my eldest child starts at uni. And it makes me wonder what kind of parent I've been. Not just whether I've had a positive influence on his character, or created enough laughter on the way. But also whether I've helped create a better or worse world for him ...
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Don’t be a Should Shoveller

I find that the people who should the most, often do the least. When I meet a manager who shoulds all over him or herself (an apt phrase at too many levels, but sadly not one I came up with!), I start to get wary. They're usually loud with it ...
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Most strategic decisions are harmful or irrelevant

Most strategic decisions made by leadership teams are at best irrelevant, and at worst harmful. And this is for one simple reason. They don't get implemented. This is especially the case in SMEs looking to scale up. And it happens for a number of reasons. Sometimes no record is made ...
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New processes won’t replace old (bad)habits

Those of us with an entrepreneurial mind tend to be bling-hogs (guilty as charged). Our bling is new books, new systems, new processes, new products, latest recruit, newest client... One of the worst impacts of this is that we can allow our obsession with bling to obscure what we really ...
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The redundant founder / CEO

The majority of my work these days tends to be with companies that need support in scaling up. That may be because they're on a rapid growth path, and need to ensure that the business scales robustly. Or because they've plateaued (or started a slow decline), with a myriad of ...
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4 Books to create better businesses

Does your financial duty trump your moral one as a business leader? For sure, we want to align the two if we can, but what if there is a conflict? Here are 4 books I've really enjoyed, which complement each other really well, and should be read by everyone building ...
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