Planning for Good Luck

Every win in my career has been due to hard work and great strategies. Every failure due to bad luck. About 10 years ago I won a million dollar a year support contract. It was due to the sensational sales strategy we had in place. Two years later the business folded [...]

Dont go to networking events, if you want to build a great network

The two weeks or so ago I took part in a panel session on Networking for CIOs. It was an interesting conversation although it pretty much centred around event attendance and using social networking tools like LinkedIn. At the end of the session, as I reflected on what  had come out of it, [...]

Alternate Resume

I have this idea I like to play with which I call the “Alternative Resume”.
Everyone we meet in business has a resume. Its normally a very dry, 3-6 page document that lists your contact details and all your achievements, in chronological order. Every item on it has been phrased to make you [...]

6 tips for “un-networking”

Imagine this scenario….

You go to a networking event, hovering at the edges of the crowd , desperately searching for someone you know, so you can chat and relax.
Succumbing to the pressure to “network” you give up and introduce yourself to a nearby stranger, who is also standing by themselves.
To your disappointment your realise that they [...]

5 Olympic Sized Opportunities

Having recently done a bit of work with people from the City of London, I have suddenly, but probably not strangely, become aware of the next Olympics due in July 2012 in London. Its also come to my attention that a number of Australian firms, that aren’t what you’d exactly call “sport” or “building” [...]

10 common business card mistakes

I’ve just come back from a two week business development campaign with a client where I collected about 100 business cards through one to one meetings and event attendance. I then went back to my office and spent 10 minutes scanning every card for import into my contact list and the organisation’s CRM [...]

Solutions to problems

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about experience versus wisdom and mentioned different types of solutions.  What I was really talking about was solutions from the entrepreneurs point of view.  I have found myself discussing this a bit lately, in fact last night  I had a meeting with a couple of senior members of [...]

5 tips for getting NDAs signed

When I was a pimply faced lad and just received my commission to be an Army Officer, I had my new boss, a senior Armoured Corps Officer held up to me as the example I should emulate. It wasn’t because he was a particularly great leader or a great soldier though, it was because [...]

Making life twice as easy

Earlier this year I had Keith Ishikawa from TBM Consulting Group speak at a Churchill Club function about applying Lean Manufacturing techniques to software engineering.  Keith was one of the original engineering team for Lexus and a major player in Toyota’s Lean Manufacturing push. I was a bit concerned about Keith originally, as his Japanese [...]

5 Learnings for Clear Thinking Teams

Recently at the Churchill Club, we were honoured to have Det. Sen. Sgt. Ron Iddles as a panellist for the “Clarity of Thought” event.  Ron is the longest serving member of the Victorian Homicide squad, having been there over 20 years and investigating over 200 murders.
Ron’s everyday work life is a hell of a lot [...]