Maintaining Passion

The case for delayed gratification

What’s going to be special about 2016? You’ll be taking yourself with you, so it’ll be much the same as last year unless you make it different.

I often fall victim to the massive annual to do list. I clear my desk in late December. Then I create a whole new rod for my back with an impressive forecast of things I am going to achieve in the New Year.

There are two problems with this. One is obvious. The list is so long that I’m already tired by the end of the first month. It clutters my head, making me easily distracted rather than focused.

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Lucky you are not good at everything

Why delegation is at the core of leadership

It was pretty obvious watching the Rugby World Cup: some players are hopeless at some things and really good at others.

It’s the same for most team sports. You don’t have to be into rugby to get this. In fact you don’t have to be into sport at all. Bear with me.

There are two parts to a rugby team: forwards and backs. Forwards are the chunky ones who often don’t look athletic. Many have no necks. A famous forward once said rugby is one of the few games where fat people can compete at an international level.

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How to grow any business

You’ve probably already got what it takes

There are several remarkable things about General Electric (GE). For a start, it’s been around for a while. Thomas Edison put it together in the late 1880s.

It was one of the first entrants in the Dow Jones Index. Out of the original members, it’s the only one still on the list. The rest have disappeared.

GE has arguably transformed itself a few times. It started making electric turbines. It developed leasing facilities for customers. That led it to finance. It’s said to have been the first business to actually own a computer. In the 1960s it had a significant computer division. It sold that business to Honeywell.

The financial crisis almost brought GE undone. Now it is exiting finance and reinvesting in manufacturing, buying industrial businesses that align with its historic strengths.

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The Wisdom of the Loud

Groupthink is alive and well, and often wrong

I was warned at an early age. You can’t believe everything you read. And that was well before the internet was running fast and loose with the truth.

I was later alarmed to find Mark Twain didn’t exactly say reports of his death were greatly exaggerated. And to find Captain Kirk never said ‘Beam me up, Scotty’ in a Star Trek episode. And how disappointing was it when astronauts couldn’t see the Great Wall of China from space?

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The power of downtime

Does doing nothing really help?

It’s sometimes hard to throttle back at this time of the year. After all, weren’t you going to get all that stuff finished by the middle of December?

It is often the result of the goals we set 12 months ago. Nothing like a bit of a stretch, we thought at the time. There’d be time to do it. Maybe there was, maybe there wasn’t. To-do lists have a habit of getting too long.

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