I am in the final stages of development of my Enhancing Their Gifts System™ - a simple, painless, sustainable, time, energy and money saving track to lift employee performance, driven by them. It is the culmination of my life's work to make it simple for business owners and leaders to ensure that the majority of your people are performing at their best on a consistent basis.



My system is godsend for business owners and leaders.



At the moment the only way you can get the…

On a plane to Indonesia this week I began reading the book ‘Wilful Blindness’ by Margaret Heffernan.



The author quotes Judge Simeon Lake’s instruction to the jury in the famous Enron case “Knowledge can be inferred if the defendant deliberately blinded himself to the existence of a fact.”



And the author’s comment “Their claim not to know was no excuse under the law.  Since they could have known, they were responsible.”



I reflected much on the half of the book…

It has been said that there are only three things that don't change, death, taxes and change.



Here is a manifesto to help you thrive on the last one.





Be the difference you want to see in the world.

Ian



I work with business owners/leaders and leaders of business units in multi-national companies to lift employee performance by enhancing their…

“I hate managing people” was my client’s opening comment, before we had greeted one another in our usual friendly manner. “Great. Time to stop trying.” was my reply. My client gave me an out of character blank look. “People cannot be managed.” I said. Another blank look.



I meet so many people negatively stressed by their perceived inability to solve so called people problems. After many years of observing and interacting with people I am led to the following…

I read a great insight in the Virgin Airlines Voyeur magazine on a flight yesterday from performance psychologist Dr. Phil Jauncey:

“There is a big misconception in sport and the corporate arena in which people think you need to get your mind right to perform, but that’s not true.



Mental toughness isn’t the ability to get your mind right before an event, it’s being able to execute when your mind is saying you can’t.”



In the article Jauncey is also quoted as saying…

My thanks to the great folk at Enablers Network for the following…

I am a fan of the book Start With Why by Simon Sinek and the philosophy he articulates: People don’t buy WHAT we do, they buy WHY we do it.



It is also my belief that when our WHY's become clear, our HOW's become easy!

as I state in this blog.



How is just as important as why however.  Our why’s attract people to us.  Our how is what keeps…

I wrote most of the article below more than a decade ago and expanded on the concept in my Changing What's Normal book.



Nothing has changed in our political landscapes!



Please forward to politicians.



As far back as 2003 authors Kouzes and Posner said Collaboration has become the master skill of this age. Our ability to work together will determine mutual failure or mutual…

Are you a business owner or leader employing 10 to 200 people?



Would you like to be free of people problems in your business?



There are massive rewards from doing so, namely:

increased top and bottom lines

freedom to do more of what you want

improved well-being and the many associated consequences



Enhancing their gifts™ is a low investment/high return system that you implement in your own way.



Subscribe…

Even good leaders tell me that they are spending 25% of their time solving or attempting to solve so called people problems. Where do you stand on the leaders ladder below?

At least once a week I observe what I call The Leadership Gap.



Business owners and entrepreneurs suffer big time from this gap and so do leaders in multinational corporations.  No one is immune.  The consequences for your business are dire - lower than possible morale and productivity, employee turnover and therefore unnecessary employment costs, lower than essential levels of service and therefore you lose customers/clients as well as failing to gain new ones.



The list…

After hearing for the umpteenth time last week the following coming out of the mouths of Australian politicians from all sides, “We must do whatever it takes to uphold the integrity of parliament,” I looked up integrity on my computer dictionary. It says: “The quality of being honest and having strong moral principles. The state of being whole and undivided.”



Instead of being whole and undivided it seems to me that most politicians behave in the opposite.  Their brawling in…

I was honoured to present the keynote address at the Association for Sustainability in Business Conference on the Gold Coast last week.



Although I don’t use slides in such presentations below is the slideshare provided to delegates that shares the substance behind the stories shared.



My key points:

Profit is not a reason for being in business, rather a result of being good at business.



Sustainability is both a reason and a result.



We…

Change management in my view, like strategic planning, is an oxymoron.



Change initiatives are highly successful when leadership (both as something we do for other people as well as for ourselves) and management, are thought about and acted on in partnership rather than as the one discipline.





People everywhere confuse strategy and planning, two completely different disciplines. Think about the two together at your peril. Strategy is about how and planning about…

I read a very brave book recently - Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth, by David Korten

The 7 interventions David puts forward would dramatically change our world for the better. Massive people power is needed to see these interventions happen.

A line in the book struck me "when the people lead - the leaders will…

I value the insights from the folk at Corporate Eye.





I would value your comments about their two blogs about the ten principles for a new economy put forward by the Tellus Institute in 2010.





Corporate Eye's first blog about this is here and their second…

I never quite got the hang of Facebook. I joined initially because everyone else was and so I thought there might be something in it.  I gave a lot of value I think.  Return on investment of time and energy (admittedly I didn’t spend a lot of either) zilch, zero, nothing. LinkedIn on the other hand very glad to belong and contribute.

No one from Facebook has ever contacted me to ask me what I want.  LinkedIn has.

No one from Apple has ever contacted me either.  Apple produces…