Organisational Promotion and What it has to do with Chimpanzees - Andrew O'Keefe

One of the great mysteries of organisational life is how some people, who don’t seem so capable to their peers, just keep getting promoted. A few years ago two staff members were overheard sharing their frustration about their boss as they left a meeting with him, one colleague saying to the other, “Sooner or later, in a moment of madness, someone will promote him.” Let’s add a clue to solving the puzzle of moving up, or down, the pecking order. First let’s go to basic instincts in the animal world.

Click to read more ...

Climate Change and Nuclear Power in Australia - a speech by Dr Ziggy Switkowski

Recently I had the pleasure of attending a luncheon arranged by The Australian German Association where Dr Ziggy Switkowski was key speaker. Ziggy has previously been CEO of Telstra before the Sol era and is now chairman of ANSTO. The subject was climate change and the future of nuclear power in Australia. What follows is a summary of his speech.

Click to read more ...

Destination: Work - Thriving in a Tough Economy by Tapping Into the Discretionary Effort of Your Employees, Ross Reck, Ph.D. & Harry Paul

Has your company’s bottom line taken a serious hit because of today’s lousy economic climate? Has your company tried to fix the situation by undergoing a round or two of layoffs, only to see your productivity plummet because of reduced morale and your better performing employees jumping ship to other companies or surfing the internet for job postings on your time? If so, would you like to turn your situation around instantly—as in overnight? If you think something like this is impossible, think again. The secret for turning things around is to tap into the discretionary effort of your employees—get them excited about coming to work and applying every bit of energy, creativity and passion they have toward performing their jobs instead of doing only what they have to do to in order to stay employed. How important is discretionary effort to the success of a business? Towers Perrin looked at 50 global companies over a 12 month period and found a direct relationship between discretionary effort and company performance. They found that the companies that received high levels of discretionary effort from their employees had a 19 percent increase in operating income and nearly a 28 percent increase in earnings per share.

Click to read more ...

Creative Elegance - the power of incomplete ideas, Matthew E. May

It is nearly impossible to make it through a typical day without exchanging ideas. Whether deciding on something as simple as a restaurant for a long overdue night out, or as complicated as the design of an entirely new product, we are forever involved in sculpting and selling our creative thought. Conventional wisdom says that to be successful, an idea must be concrete, complete, and certain. But what if that’s wrong? What if the most elegant, most imaginative, most engaging ideas are none of those things? Gaze at the image below for a moment. The three sets of right-angled lines depict something so ubiquitous that you’d be hard-pressed to make it through the day without it. Can you identify it? If you can’t, it’s because a key piece of information is missing. Once that information is shared, however, you will never again be able to see the image in quite the same way again. You are looking at the upper case version of the most widely used letter in the English language. The letter, though, exists in the white space. Do you see it now? It is the letter E. Look again. My guess is that from now on, you’ll have difficulty not seeing it.

Click to read more ...

Real Advice Hurts

In the wonderful Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott talks about the incredible, ripping pain she felt after having her tonsils removed. All she wanted to do was chug pain killers and let the stupid thing heal, but, Anne’s doctor gave her some advice that she found as unbelievable as it was painful: he told her to chew some gum. Turns out that, as with a lot of injuries, the entirely sensible impulse to protect and baby a wounded area was the opposite of what Anne actually needed in order to fix the problem. So, by enduring the excruciating pain of chewing gum for just a few minutes, the muscles in her throat suddenly unclenched, and Anne’s pain went away forever. The advice Anne wanted wasn’t the advice she needed. And, like we all eventually learn, the best advice you’ll get in life hurts like hell at the time. Because it has to.

Click to read more ...