This article is not about business but about values and beliefs – and my personal ones at that. Having said that, I frequently recommend what I am about to share with you to mentoring clients. I came across this wonderful poem about 35 years ago and it has haunted me ever since. I’ve been incredibly [...]

Are you a leader? Would you consider yourself ambitious for yourself and your organisation? Of course you are! Ambition is good. It drives us forward and stretches us so that we take on new ideas and experiment. It makes us do things. It makes us grow as people and those benefits accrue to the company [...]

As I write this, the economic outlook for the UK (and Europe) is looking precarious to say the least. Although we are not currently in a recession, market conditions are tough with a credit squeeze, rocketing fuel and power prices, falling house prices and statements from the Bank of England and many leading retailers that [...]

At some point in the distant past, a client was describing the problems he was having implementing a particularly tricky change policy on his company. While listening to him I realised that I’d been through this situation several times myself so we discussed what his options were to overcome objectors. Out of that discussion came [...]

Working with a client recently, they mentioned that they had started to hold internal lunchtime meetings to discuss how they were delivering projects for clients. They called these ‘TEAM Meetings’. “why ‘TEAM’?” I asked thinking it stood for something, as it was all in capitals. Nobody was able to give me an answer which set [...]

A great business leader, Sir John Harvey-Jones, died last month. For those who are not aware, he was a leading light in the UK business community since the early 1980′s when he rose to public prominence as the chairman of ICI, which he guided to be one of the most successful companies in the UK [...]

I was chatting recently with Dermot Hill of Intramezzo who posed this question. Given my experience as a Chairman and my love of this role, it set me thinking. Note that I’m going to use the word “Chairman” in a non-gender specific context in this article. Companies appoint a Chairman for a variety of reasons. [...]

Maybe it is just me, but shortly after posting about how pygmies are taking over the world, I had 2 really bad experiences of customer service from the same company. There is a well-known budget hotel chain here in the UK called Travelodge. I have used its various hotels frequently in the last year or [...]

As an entrepreneur, I have created many businesses. And these businesses need certain advisers like lawyers and accountants. Like many of you, these “species”, and I use the word advisedly, are not my most favourite people as they cost me lots of money and don’t appear to deliver much value. Recently I was with one [...]