Faith in Business is about workplaces. And what characterises most modern workplaces is their secularity, if only because diverse workforces rarely share the same religious belief systems. This immediately presents the Christian leader with a technical problem. Is it legitimate for them to appeal to an authority whose existence others doubt? Read More
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
Some extraordinary women joined us last night for the Verve launch. This is what was in the goody bag – follow the links for references:
As you know from my blog, I’m no introvert, and I’m not drawn to being a reflective learner by preference. But lots of my friends are still reading Quiet, and I know that lots of introverts hate the sort of learning that feels like making a fool of yourself in public, so I thought you’d be interested in this. Read More
What’s on the average manager’s mind? Too much, it would appear. In one of their periodic bedroom surveys, Ashridge Business School found that managers spend fewer than 7 hours asleep at night, and this decreases as seniority increases. Match this up with a long-day no-lunch culture, and this becomes an extremely alarming statistic. 17 hours of sustained wakefulness has been shown to result in changes in behaviour equivalent to drinking 2 glasses of wine. In the UK people who’ve drunk this much aren’t allowed to drive or operate machinery, yet their equivalents are at the helm of some of our largest companies, making really scary decisions, every single day. Should shareholders be worried?
The Pope (Retd) is to spend the rest of his days quietly in the Vatican’s Mater Ecclesiae nunnery (sans nuns). It may be that a scandal has yet to emerge, which would explain a little better why this pope really decided to retire, the first to do so in 600 years. But if he has genuinely decided to throw in the towel on grounds of ill-health, he may have just performed his most important act as a global leadership role model. His exit contains valuable insight for those in any sacred or secular profession, particularly where a role has become vocational.
My Godson fixes me with a beady eye. “If I finish my peas, do I get a sticker?” I was on holiday, taking the twins on a Progress to meet their northern relatives, and visiting friends en route. Every fridge I saw boasted a sticker-chart, and every meal seemed to go the same way, coupled with endless negotiation about getting dressed, sharing toys, doing jobs, and behaving in general. The more enterprising children would have shocked Luther with their creativity in conjuring up fresh sticker opportunities. They reminded me of those cartoon Catholics of yore, who played the system by figuring out that sinning generates more God points than leading a blameless life, because it enables you to get grace top-ups through confession and absolution.
When I was at Deloitte, and a Partner fixed you with his beady eye and barked ‘Feedback – offline!’ your knees started to knock. I gather the culture at Apple was similar, if more public, and someone I know at Tesco once had his report torn in two by Sir Terry at a board meeting and was told ‘there’s your feedback’. This Apprentice-style approach seems only to be on the rise. A recent study of contract workers reports that fewer than 7% of them would consider returning to traditional employment, and I suspect this insidious ‘feedback’ culture is partly to blame. But why does feedback have to be such a negative experience? Read More
No company worth its salt neglects these days to have a set of corporate values. Merrill Lynch famously had theirs etched in stone in the lobby of their London office. To these are customarily linked a set of leadership competencies, to facilitate the annual appraisal process. I’m sure these change with the weather, but Barclays traditionally had a set of ‘leadership imperatives’ which included things like ‘Driving Value Creation’ and ‘Pulling Together’. The list included ‘Inspiring Others’, ‘Straight Talking’ and – Bob – ‘Sharing Power & Responsibility.’ Read More
When I was at college, much of the discussion about careers was whether you wanted to go for the ‘ks’ or the ‘k’ – a job that paid a lot of money, or a job where you would reap the rewards of public service. Fred Goodwin chose a path that gave him both sorts of k. While he has famously hung on to quite a lot of money, last week he rather publicly lost his Honour. Read More
