How to grow strategically
This week’s insights are based on two different yet similar books: John C. Maxwell’s No Limits: Blow the cap off your capacity” and Annie Stewart’s “Career to Calling: How to make the switch“. The books have lots of similarities: both authors are coaches and focus on building people’s capacity to do things they didn’t think […]
How to create Blue Oceans for breakthrough ideas
These past few weeks I have been reading Blue Oceans Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant. Many of us look at the current systems as they are and try to beat the competition or work within that system to bring change. But our existing systems are what the authors, […]
3 key areas of improvement every leader should embrace
Lately I have kept thinking about what makes someone a good leader. I keep wondering about this as I have immersed myself for the last 3 years in reading loads of books on leadership, what enabling and agile teams look like, how important good leadership is for innovation. And yet, often I find that all […]
How to leap between theory and practice
Many of us who aspire to be great leaders and wanting to make an impact know how much leadership is a learned skill that is a mix of theory (all the leadership resources we consume) and practice (actually dealing with people). You can read piles of leadership books and understand the core principles of good […]
How to prioritise through directed commitment
The famous Jim Collins quote says that the most important thing is to first to get the right people in the bus, otherwise you’ll spend most of your time arguing where you should be heading and how to get there. This is highly applicable also to how you prioritise your activities and goals: if you […]
How to influence crowds in a way that matters
This week I attended Griffith University’s Change Conference 2019 that has been organised by our Social Marketing group. I attended this conference last year (see previous blog) and this year I continued to be blown away by the stellar speakers and insights on influencing, marketing and bringing about behavioural and social change. Communication, risk groups, and […]
How to see around corners and enable organisational innovation
The latest book I have been reading is Seeing Around Corners: How to spot inflection points in business before they happen by Rita McGrath who delivers a sobering message every leader and innovator needs to hear: if we want to stay ahead and innovate, we need to understand how trends emerge and spot them before they […]
How to build and use tribes to change culture
Developing and creating tribes within organisations can change overall culture resulting in increases in well-being, innovation and high performance. In this post I keep unpacking these insights from Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organisation because I do believe that understanding the different phases and especially how to move people to those […]
Why tribal leadership matters
These past weeks I have been reading Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organisation, and doing a lot of thinking as to why particular cultures form within an organisation, but also how we can influence company culture. Most people are familiar with the now famous quote attributed to Peter Drucker Culture eats […]
How to learn to lead (well)
In the university context, we often focus on issues like how to develop robust research methodologies, how to write a good journal paper, how to do amazing literature reviews, and how to contribute new knowledge to existing research topics and themes. However, we spend much less time in thinking about professional development, the skills that […]