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2022Harnessing the power of free conversation
Steven Johnson in his TED Talk “Where good ideas come from” tells us the coffee house changed history. Prior to the advent of the British coffee house, alcohol was the healthy drink of choice. As water was contaminated, people had beer for breakfast, wine for lunch and gin for dinner. This meant that most of the time, people were drunk. With the importation of coffee…
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2022Top down alcohol and drug testing
Drug and alcohol testing is now a normal part of life at many industrial sites. Employers (from the board down) don’t want to be held responsible for the repercussions of an industrial accident. Noting there is a link between people being affected by drugs and alcohol and industrial safety, organisations are putting into place precautions to save people (and companies) from their detrimental…
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2022Art of transformation
At a recent lecture, Dr Jennifer Garvey Berger explained that the difference between change and transformation was that change is learning information that fits into your current world view. Transformation is learning to change the form of what you know so as to open up a new world view. Change is learning as you know it-transformation is changing your habits of mind. She highlighted 3…
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2022Why verbal abuse is bad for business
In her book “The Verbally Abusive Relationship”,Patricia Evans tells us that the abuser and the abused come from quite different realities. Reality I, that of the abuser, is a “power over reality” from which the abuser seeks to gain control and dominance over the other. The “power over reality” mostly stems from a toxic childhood where power was exerted over the infant to be and…
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2022You can have it all
Over one year has passed since 1000 people occupied Wall Street in September 2011-several hundred staying for days. This simple protest led to a chain reaction around the globe with tens of thousands of people on every continent occupying local business districts. In Australia we had 3000 in Sydney and 4000 in Melbourne. Like the canary in the mine that served as an early warning…
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2022What is change?
What is change? Organisational change used to be about implementing something new (an IT system for example) or restructuring (up-sizing, downsizing or reorganising the organisational components) or “changing a culture” (which seems to mean very different things to different people). All of these changes are incremental changes. They can be defined and dealt with as tame problems(ie we know where we are starting, we know…
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2022The advantage of doing nothing
During my MBA I learnt that if you get results you will be rewarded. I expected that when I helped companies become world leaders, people would come to me and ask how I did it-wrong. All too often I saw that when a leader performed two or three times better than his or her peers-a huge range of political forces where turned against that leader….
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2022The Empathy Deficit
Two Australian women are producing a “social change film” on empathy. The idea for the film ‘Stand in my shoes’ came about when Viv Somers and Anna Reeves did research that indicated as a society we are becoming ever less empathetic. Barak Obama called it an “empathy deficit”. We just don’t care enough about each other. Sociologists tell us that the success or failure of…
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2022Playing politics well
For many people politics is a dirty word-whether it is in government or organisations. However, politics is simply the use of power. Power is the ability to get things done and to achieve results. Politics is a tool to achieve objectives with and through others. Politics is, of itself, value neutral. Some people use political skills to achieve outcomes for the common good, others use…
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2022
Why ‘Management Inertia’ is your Biggest Threat!
Interview with Karen Moses, former COO and head of strategy for Origin Energy, about the impact of digital disruption on Australian companies. Karen is currently Chairmman of Sydney Dance Company, and director of Charter Hall, Orica, Boral, State Super Trustees and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. She is also on the Finkel panel setup by the federal government to review the national energy market.