The repeated aggressive actions designed to belittle, humiliate or exclude is the act of bullying. Whether it’s in the school playground, online, at work or in the board room, there are four groups involved in bullying. They are present in all cases, and if the bullying behaviour is to stop, you have to deal with all four. Before...Read More

The final day of the company directors course focussed on board effectiveness –  what is it? how can it be managed? what’s best practice? what are some of the traps? The first half involved long time board recruiter Mike Horabin sharing his vast knowledge and decades of hard won experience. The second half involved us being put...Read More

I’m back at school again, this time on the student side, for the first time in 18 years. Day one of the AICD Company Directors Course has just ended, and I’m going to blog my thoughts and take aways each day, so this will be the first of 5 such posts…  The CDC course involves 10...Read More

At a recent business cocktail function the WA swimmer Eamon Sullivan was interviewed about his illustrious career, which has included a world championship gold and a bronze, 2 Olympic silvers and bronze, as well as various world records. A major take away for me was his honest self appraisal of his failure to win gold at...Read More

On Friday I helped out delivering boxes of books to clients. It was a nice change from the desk job, and got me out into 13 offices from across the city, through East Perth, up to Joondalup and back down to Osborne Park and West Perth. There were 9 books to a box (each book a 228 page...Read More

Let us consider the desk of a music teacher. It’s a mess. Scraps of paper. Bits of old instruments. Manuscripts. Old tour programmes. Scrunched up notepad. Yesterday’s lunch remains. A half drunk cup of coffee. A lunky gonk. Some chewed pencils. A Music teacher’s desk is the desk of a creative mind. It’s a buzz,...Read More

There’s nothing quite like a neat, succinct slogan (or natty headline for that matter) that neatly encapsulates a big point into a tasty few words. Businesses strive for this with ‘tag lines’ for the promotional campaigns – ‘don’t cheat on the cheese‘ is one I remember back in the 1980s, being a TV ad for UK...Read More

Things that creep up on you can be the hardest to recognise and defend against. Whether they be imaginary spooks hiding in the dark to frighten you from your slumbers, or people quietly tip toeing up behind you to shout ‘boo!’ in your ear, if you don’t see it coming, it can be unnerving when it’s...Read More

As a team exercise, you are given $10 and told to turn that into as much money as you can in a month. What would you do? I used to give my management and marketing class (Year 10s) this challenge in their first lesson, and see what they would come up with. They’d be given...Read More

Some matters are best left to business, others to government. This is what makes a ‘mixed economy’ and defines most democratic nations. The only debate seems to be ‘how much government is good?’ or ‘does this particular thing need to be run by government?’. Private schools sit alongside (sometimes next door to) public schools. So too...Read More