management

communicating modes

By brendan at 7 November, 2011, 12:42 pm

A friend of mine has a beautiful house outside of Geelong. It sits on an acre, has an orchard and chooks in the backyard and started off life as a church. And it was while looking over this view and drinking wine on a hot day recently, that I had a major insight into management [...]

natural ceilings

By brendan at 7 November, 2011, 12:10 pm

An odd thing I noticed a long time ago when I was I in the Army was that most of the Lieutenant Colonels I met used to give me a really bad time, and were unpleasant to work with. I accepted this as I assumed that as a young Lieutenant, I was forever mucking things [...]

The 10 Principles of War

By brendan at 7 November, 2011, 11:56 am

Around the start of my career in the late 80′s, Eastern thought was very big in the workplace. There was a growing awareness of Japanese solutions such as Kanban and Keiretsu. Management books such as Miyamoto Musashi’s – The Book of 5 Rings and Sun Tzu’s The Art of War were massively popular as books [...]

the money plan

By brendan at 29 June, 2011, 4:16 pm

I had breakfast the other morning with Scott Kilmartin of Haul. I like talking to Scott about the retail market because he has both heaps of experience, and quality insight. Scott felt that the small independent retailer was absolutely on the wane at the moment and on June 30th a lot of accountants would be [...]

managing successful employees

By brendan at 21 June, 2011, 10:47 am

At the of the day I lay my head down on the pillow and asked my wife “So how’d it go?”. “Great” she said. She’d been having problems with a senior employee who had started refusing to undertake activities he had been doing for the last 9 months, because they weren’t specifically in his “task [...]

Tall & Stupid – Meet the CEO

By brendan at 18 September, 2010, 4:18 pm

The average height of an Australian Male in 1995 was measured at 174.8cm (~ 5ft 9in) by the ABS. I am 174cm (5ft 8in & ½) tall. So imagine my irritation when I met with the CEO of a major (AUD$1B in revenue) Australian organisation who was around 188cm (6ft 2”). He followed me around [...]

The Language of Business

By brendan at 13 September, 2010, 9:32 pm

I was in the Army when I first heard the expression “The best way of learning something is to teach it”. Another expression I like is that “you don’t truly understand something until you have to explain it”. This is especially true when you have to explain it to a child. So last week I [...]

How to get help

By brendan at 13 July, 2010, 12:59 pm

The other week I had coffee with Chris Stewart who is a Melbourne based entrepreneur and strategic foresight consultant. Both Chris and I have lots of different skill sets and we both enjoy starting new ventures. We tend to catch up around once or twice a year and discuss what “wisdom” we have gained since [...]

Making life twice as easy

By brendan at 13 April, 2010, 2:34 pm

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

By brendan at 6 April, 2010, 2:37 pm

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 [...]