When building a business, determine the roles the business needs, then fit, develop, hire the right people to fit those roles. Sounds obvious? Well, it is, and it works, yet it seems so often that businesses default to the reverse, assessing individuals first, then...
What is the single most important message for your audience? Yesterday I sat with a client as they talked through the questions they had received for a "in conversation with" video they were about to film later that day. There were about eight questions around a...
My late mentor and friend Ed Percival, has left a truly powerful "tombstone legacy" through many you have learned from him and share what they have learned. Among the many phrases wrongly attributed to Winston Churchill, though losing none of the power of the...
The most powerful voice in the universe is yours because the most important words in the universe are yours. Self-talk matters. Choose wisely.Gregg Parini, Head Swimming Coach & Professor at Denison University Concise wisdom from Gregg Parini in a tweet this past...
In the mid-1990s, in my late 20s, the Squash Club in Cayman was looking to reinvigorate their junior programme. I was on the board of the club at the time and myself and another member, the late and dearly missed Derek Tyler, agreed to get this started. At the time, I...
When we plant a rose seed in the earth, we notice that it is small, but we do not criticize it as “rootless and stemless.” We treat it as a seed, giving it the water and nourishment required of a seed. When it first shoots up out of the earth, we don’t condemn it as...
From an epic twitter thread from the Bank of Jamaica **WARNING - some Economics geekery follows** My favourite podcast (yes, even more so than the bickering of Simon Mayo and Mark Kermode on Wittertainment ) is by David McWilliams. This week David showed himself, as...
Get clear on the WHY and the V2MOM method. Love the way @benioff uses a method that a) cascades down through @salesforce, b) is transparent,…
Image by Jan Buchczik for Arthur Brooks Thanks to one of my favourite deep readers and thinkers, Georgie Loxton, for sharing in her latest newsletter an article by Arthur Brooks called: "How to buy happiness". Broadly, the piece talks about how money can only buy...
How to approach risk and impact to get "unstuck". Approach to Risk - a Shirlaws Group tool Some of the most powerful learning I have had in my career came from being an active part of Shirlaws for years. In addition to deep training as a coach, the business tools and...
Thermometers react to their surroundings. A Thermostat reads and regulates its environment. A Thermostat embodies equanimity. Later today my guest on WhatComesNextLive is Scott Perry of Creative on Purpose. As I am fond of saying, "people are my library" and I love to...
How well can you read people? How well do you read expressions, and how well can you read people beyond their expressions? Is this expression: Embarrassment? Fear? Sadness? Surprise? So much of our communication goes beyond words to our tone of voice and our...
To begin, I write daily and don't edit my posts either as I write or afterwards. Some age well, some may not. Here on April 12, 2021, as we have mania around BTC and NFTs and more, I nail my colours to the mast and recommend you focus on intrinsic value. The other day...
What can the Diffusion of Innovations curve teach you about your readiness and willingness to change post-pandemic?
Photo: Luis Ascenso CC BY 2.0 Monster waves birth in the open ocean, but tectonic business waves begin with consumer spending. Are you or will you be ready to ride the Monster Waves? The massive waves of Portugal are a function of the Nazaré Canyon, a submarine...
Liminality can mean taking opportunities early, and it can also mean being comfortable waiting to see how things takes shape. What might it mean for…
Flawsome - An individual who embraces their flaws and knows they are awesome regardless. I post every day. Every. Single. Day. Sometimes people will even say to me "Daily, that is awesome!". I accept their acknowledgement, then might say, "thank you for that, and I'd...
Distilling down to "one word" is a "Creative Constraint". Once you land on this, you have space to improvise on that theme. Screenshot of home page of Design Cayman It’s true, at least for now, that there are plenty of fish in the sea. And it’s also true that shooting...
On numerous occasions I have written from different directions around the idea of creative constraints. Thoughts on "Tenner", now called the 10x Challenge. Yesterday, in response to a post about the need to and power of accepting difference in the school education...
Without clear boundaries, empowerment and the open sharing of thoughts, individuals will not feel safe to improvise and moments will not be seized. Kathryn Chapman, self-portrait(c) Kathryn Chapman Photography I deeply appreciate the amazing people I meet and get to...
Create alignment to serve both your customer's needs and those of your business. Make sure both you and they have skin in the game. “Do not pay attention to what people say, only to what they do, and to how much of their necks they are putting on the line”from "Skin...
When life throws things at you, do you respond, or simply react? Observe, Orient, Decide Act. “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” from "Man's Search for...
Image (c) Julie Corsetti of Deep Blue Images. Hurricane Ivan gallery here After Hurricane Ivan in 2004, my LandCruiser was heavily used in the aftermath, driving on broken and sometimes flooded roads that were often covered in debris and roofing nails. After about six...
The five levels of cognitive prowess by Albert Einstein: Smart, Intelligent, Brilliant, Genius, and Simple. Abir Bushan Einstein's five ascending levels of intellect SmartIntelligentBrilliantGeniusSimple My role as a Sounding Board is the opposite of being an expert,...
When recruiting, be aware of what you need right away and also in the future. “Go to where the puck is going, not where it has been”Walter Gretzky, to his son Wayne as a young ice hockey player, later to be known simply as “The Great One” Many leaders are turning...
Think about your own balance between Engagement and Fulfillment. A phrase I use often is "We are Human Beings, not Human Doings". This week I was on a webinar by Imperative to learn more about their peer coaching software as a service, whilst also learning about the...
Stoicism is an increasingly well known philosophy dating back to ancient Rome (and Greece) and such key figures as Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus. As we move nearly a year into the pandemic, and particularly here in Britain, we hear of people saying all kinds of...
Write to discover your thoughts. Exoskeleton to give strength, from the movie Elysium I am often asked what my processes/systems/habits for writing daily are, most recently by Rick Carabba of Brainbank, so this is for you, Rick, as my reply explained that, well, I...
"The Old Guard" (Photo courtesy of Netflix © 2020 ) I've flowed on a theme in recent days, from "Don’t be bland if you want to be remembered" to "Weirdness is a Superpower" and now "Only Connect". Taken as a piece, these three posts are about both choosing to stand...
Wabi Sabi: Nothing lasts, nothing is finished, nothing is perfect, and therein lies its beauty. Courtesy Sketchplanations, words from Wabi Sabi Simple An episode from a BBC radio series "The Death of Nuance" starts out with a list of "untranslatable" words, reminding...
What is Wealth? With a post title like that I could get really esoteric, but today instead I'd like to concentrate on what Chip Conley would call an Emotional Equation. Focus x Stoicism x Time x Diversification = Wealth This comes courtesy of Professor Scott Galloway...
Yesterday morning, Sunday, I couldn't think of what to write for my next daily post. Normally inspiration flows easily, but sometimes it doesn't. Rather than look to "think my way out of it", I went for a walk. To add to it, I love listening to stories, and currently...
I recently listened to a short series of radio shows called "The Death of Nuance" The opening programme highlights how much, in our 24/7, social media driven world of "news", we see things in binary, yes/no, either/or terms. I often say I'm a "both/and" person, am not...
#OpenLeadership is the secret to linking the new way of thinking about vision, strategy and leadership to deliver on strategy over time. #BeMoreYou #OpenLeadership "How long from when you put your Strategic Plan into action until it is not worth the paper it is...
My first job interview after qualifying as an accountant, almost thirty years ago, was with Kel Thompson, at that time Managing Director of Cayman Airways. Among many lessons that stay with me from that first interaction was him telling me he expected me to make...
We have a real role in helping our clients along their way, because they do have dreams. They have dreams to grow and build. Scale for Impact model, from the "Leading from Purpose" article The model above is core to my thinking on #OpenLeadership, on the type of brave...