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neurobiology Archives - Eve Poole

Oct 24
3

Leadersmithing TEDx

By | Business | No Comments

Here is my script for the TEDx I gave about Leadersmithing on 11 March 2017. You can also watch it here.

Hello. You’re probably wondering what’s with the pearls. Well, pearls have a dirty secret, and I’m here to tell you about it. It’s all about the pearls. So if you only remember 1 thing about this talk, remember the pearls.

Pearls are associated with such glamour, aren’t they? I inherited my first set, from a great grandmother who had been brought up at Hampton Court Palace. My second set were from Hatton Garden, given to me by my boyfriend when we worked next door at Deloitte Consulting. I bought my third set in Beijing when I took our Ashridge MBA students out there on a study trip.

But their glamour is hard-won. They have grit in their hearts. Their beauty and lustre is the result of a defence mechanism, designed to protect the oyster against a threatening irritant. I’m from Scotland, and in Scotland they don’t say ‘pearls’: they say ‘perils.’ And perils is exactly what the beauty of a pearl is bearing witness to – it owes its very existence to the oyster being in peril. Read More

Aug 29
0

Robot Dread

By | Business, Theology | No Comments

I sense a morbid fear behind our catastrophizing about androids, which I reckon is to do with a loss of autonomy. It’s true that for periods in history tribes and people have assumed they have no autonomy, life being driven by the fates or by a predetermined design or creator, so this could be a particularly modern malady in an era that luxuriates in free will. But concern about the creep of cyborgism through the increasing use of technology in and around our bodies seems to produce a frisson of existential dread that I have been struggling to diagnose. Technology has always attracted its naysayers, from the early saboteurs to the Luddites and the Swing Rioters, and all the movements that opposed the Industrial Revolution, but this feels less about livelihoods and more about personhood. Read More

Mar 11
3

Leadersmithing – TEDx Durham University

By | Business | One Comment

Speech at TEDx, Durham, 11th March 2017 (watch here)

Hello. You’re probably wondering what’s with the pearls. Well, pearls have a dirty secret, and I’m here to tell you about it. It’s all about the pearls. So if you only remember one thing about this talk, remember the pearls.

Pearls are associated with such glamour, aren’t they? I inherited my first set, from a great grandmother who had been brought up at Hampton Court Palace. My second set were from Hatton Garden, given to me by my boyfriend when we worked next door at Deloitte Consulting. I bought my third set in Beijing when I took our Ashridge MBA students out there on a study trip.

But their glamour is hard-won. They have grit in their hearts. Their beauty and lustre is the result of a defence mechanism, designed to protect the oyster against a threatening irritant. I’m from Scotland, and in Scotland they don’t say ‘pearls’: they say ‘perils.’ And perils is exactly what the beauty of a pearl is bearing witness to – it owes its very existence to the oyster being in peril. Read More

Jan 29
3

The Ridley Lecture

By | Theology | No Comments

As well as Chairing Faith in Business here at Ridley, I teach leadership at Ashridge Business School. Over the last 10 years or so I’ve been lucky enough to help quite a wide range of leaders work out how to get better at what they do. I’ve taught the Head of Clouds at the Met Office, the Head of Killing at Bernard Matthews, and the Administrator of Tristan da Cunha. Read More

Jan 29
0

qui ambulant in lege domini

By | Theology | No Comments

Sermon preached at Portsmouth Cathedral, Sunday 29 January 2012

The anthem for today is Beati Quorum Via by Charles Villiers Stanford. The choir might be interested to know that, while he was an undergraduate in the 1870s, Stanford was so cross with the Cambridge University Musical Society for refusing to allow female singers that he founded his own mixed voice choir. It was so much better than theirs, that the Musical Society gave in and agreed to a merger, so it is a particularly apt choice today. Read More

Jan 26
1

Am I choosing to write this blog?

By | Business, Theology | No Comments

You may recall that a chapter on Corporate Psychopaths was included in the 2010 book I co-edited on Ethical Leadership. Its primary author, Clive Boddy, has been attracting some recent press attention on the subject, following publication of an extended version of the chapter in the Journal of Business Ethics. One of my longstanding worries about this very useful identification of a potential boardroom problem is whether the said psychopaths could then use this diagnosis to plead diminished responsibility for any perceived wrongdoing. Read More

Apr 18
1

How to Learn

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I recently wrote a leaflet for Ashridge on how to learn, based on a combination of Ashridge’s 50 years’ experience in executive education and our recent research into the neurobiology of learning. Here are my Learning Basics and Top 10 Tips. Read More

Dec 19
0

Turbo-charging Leadership – the ‘Google’ Project

By | Business | No Comments

I love google. All that data out there. One click and the google elves trot about the web fetching it for you. Wheelbarrows of the stuff. At Ashridge I have decided our next generation 3Rs for learning are Receptiveness, Retention and Retrieval: how can we optimise a leader’s receptiveness to learning, to what extent can we help them retain in their memory what they have learned, and how effectively will they be able to retrieve this knowledge when they need to use it. These 3Rs are now defining our agenda for the Centre for Research in Executive Development (CRED). Read More