The best leaders I’ve known have always intimately got that being a leader is more of a role that they play than an hierarchical position in which they sit. Meaning that they don’t lord over you. They don’t assume that they have all the right answers. They don’t expect you to do everything they say […]
Tips, News & Views
How did we allow technology to undermine our commitments?
Once in a land we all lived in a long long time ago, I’d call a few people to arrange to meet. We’d fix a date, then we’d all magically find ourselves at the agreed location. Today, I email out a doodle poll. A quarter of the invitees reply. The most popular date and time […]
Interview for Values fit, not Cultural alignment
Do you interview for cultural fit? I did. And I was wrong. I’ve interviewed well over 1000 people. As the person responsible for my team (whether in my own company, on the board of another, or as a senior manager post-acquisition), I was the “culture” part of the interview for a long time. What became […]
Leaders, your role is to catalyse, amplify and own
Leaders, your role is to catalyse, amplify and own. In fact, whether you realise it or not, you’ll be doing all of those all of the time simply by virtue of being a leader, a founder, a CEO. Which means that your challenge is whether you’ll be doing them intentionally and constructively. Whether you’ll be […]
The “me” economy
This graph says it all. We have become far more focussed on ourselves than on others, and the world is worse for it. I’ve used Google’s Ngram to pull together the relative usage of the phrase “Yourself first” and “Others first” over 40 years from 2008. You can see how in 1968, the two phrases […]