leadership

Throughout their careers, sportsmen and women will take part in thousands of races.  Business people will make thousands of presentations - most of which will fall on (kinda) deaf ears. Unless they fall in the rare 0,5% who chose their parents correctly, like Steve Jobs, Bruce Fordyce, Mark Allen and Lance Armstrong, they will achieve winning or exceptional results in only a hand-full of the events they start.  Mentally speaking, the biggest challenge in every event is to replicate your best performance time and time again.  Champions become what they are through consistent performance. 

 I’m in the fortunate position to get contributions from all over the world for my Blog – which is great. Clients, past and present, send me stuff. I very seldom publish it as I try to keep posts here from my own keyboard so to speak. But I can’t resist posting this.

We know that public transport in South Africa in non-existent or diabolical in the first place. So in the run-up to the FIFA World Cup its astounding to read that the public transport infrastructure in one of the host cities has now virtually ceased to exist.

I'm still trying to trace the original source, it was sent to me by someone in the SA Justice system. He's trying to get hold of the original author.

Read carefully and draw your own conclusions.

I was a guest speaker at a business networking event recently and it became apparent that the secret to great networking is not how many people you know, but rather how many people know you! I know (and have met) Nelson Mandela - I'm not sure he knows who I am when he hears my name. I'm hoping to be surprised though!! In order to be truly remembered, we have to take steps that will encourage the people we meet to see us as remarkable.

The Harvard Business Review recently published the findings of research relating to effective Leadership traits. After scrutinising the leadership traits of 11 000 leaders, and isolating the worst performing 10%, Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman found the 10 most common leadership shortcomings. These are ranked according to the size of the difference between successful and unsuccessful leaders' scores. Successful and failed leaders differed most in their energy and enthusiasm as perceived by the teams they were leading.

Well, I say “new” but it’s not really new at all. It’s just a bigger challenge than ever before. Why? Because the world has fallen out of love, not just with big business, but with leadership as we know too. And we don’t need to look much beyond the current global crisis to see why. The population at large have put way too much trust (and money) into the so-called leaders of industry whose decisions and total lack of accountability have placed us in the precarious position we find ourselves in.

“There are some defeats more triumphant than victories.” Michel de Montaigne

A sundial is the timepiece that has the fewest number of moving parts. Which timepiece has the most moving parts?

Every business, no matter how big or small, is dependent on a team to achieve their goals, vision and mission statements. During the last few months, we have found a remarkable increase in the number of SME’s who have approached us to conduct team development programmes for them. I have actually just returned from one such a programme. The Management team of 7 Delegates, plus myself, all bunking in a guesthouse in Mpumalanga. The atmosphere was laidback (yes, we took time out to watch the game) yet incredibly stimulating. Their MD responded, “Excellent course, very informative and practical.”