Brains in neutral?               At regular intervals there will be an item in the news reporting on supermarket trolleys either in a stream or cluttering up the neighbourhood. There will be the inevitable demand that either the local council or the supermarkets should clear this up and behave more responsibly. Not to digress too far, the supermarkets spend a lot of money collecting these wayward trolleys, but it is simply impossible for ...

Be Smart -  Half the year is gone and no doubt we have all achieved some of what we planned for the year. It would probably be fair to say we have some new challenges, as that tends to be the norm, but the solution to our challenges might require some radical rethinking. Never get trapped in the thinking of yesterday and never let your ego determine that just because you thought some direction was a good idea six months ago, you have to stick to it.  Ditch it if its not...

A smile will never hurt you.  Lets face it we all have to deal with things that go wrong from time to time, but how do we react when this happens. Anger and frustration is the easy and wrong response, as is the hunt for the guilty and punishment for all transgressors. In my experience people never deliberately work to make things go wrong. It is normally as the result of a host of factors and if we are focused on revenge instead of clarity, the organisation pays the price....

  Truth or Fiction Last week I conducted my monthly workshop for a small group of people, on what really makes a difference. It was a lively debate with many reasons claimed to illustrate perceived differences.

Dressed in my Sherlock Holmes cloak, complete with magnifying glass, we drilled down into these claimed differences and the further we explored, the less relevant these differences became. In the end, we had to agree that many of these claims were perceptu...

  The best path to happiness is to laugh at ourselves, so just for a moment, let us not be too serious. For a long time I have listened to people making the statement that we are "the Lucky Country" and for many years I have tried to get an answer as to why we are supposed to be the Lucky Country. Last week a friend explained it to me. He said "we are lucky that the politicians have not completely destroyed the country, yet". For many years all surveys into ...