Goal-Setting: Clear the Clutter for Christmas

What better way to get ready for the Christmas/ new year break  than clearing out your cupboards. I’ve decided to motivate myself to clear the clutter with a a garage sale so I can grab some extra Christmas cash at the same time. 

I’ve often read that clearing the physical clutter lying around your house or your office is a really important part of clearing your head in preparation for new plans and goals – like the ones you set for the new year.  You can’t really put new goals on top of old distractions, else the old distractions will keep sabotaging your efforts to focus on the new direction. It’s important to make a space first.

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Integrity: Managing our inner Diva – Kylie in Dubai

What a gig! Australia’s own Kylie Minogue was the feature artist for a new 7-star Dubai Atlantis hotel opening last weekend. All for a cool $4.4m. Now that’s how you earn a bit of extra Christmas cash.

While the gig made the headlines here in Australia, what was even more interesting was what happened to Kylie after the event. After an exhausting show, she changed from her uncomfortable performance outfits into a tracksuit and headed back into the same hotel for the after party bash.

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Leadership and Integrity – Unravelling the red carpet

I had occasion to drive past the aftermath of the red carpet premier of the movie Australia in George Street Sydney last night and I couldn’t believe my eyes at the size of the red carpet. It was at least as wide as 3 lanes and who knows how far its length extended into the distance. Just goes to show how many big budget movie premiers I’ve been to, but I always thought they were about the size of a hall runner in a very long house. I guess the bigger the carpet, the more important the event, the leader, the dignitary or the celebrity walking on it. The red carpet phenomenon also applies to what you look like when you walk on the carpet. Look at the pictures of our celebrities who go to great lengths to be exquisitely coiffed and outfitted in a manner befitting royalty when the carpet calls.

Some quick research into the red carpet phenomenon takes us beyond movie premiers and back to 485BC and Aeschylus, a Greek playright. Aeschylus created a character called Agenemon whose wife deceives him into walking onto red carpet which was intended for the gods.  Fast forward to the 1820s and we see the red carpet rolled out for a US President and in 1902 red carpet is used in ceremonial fashion to welcome guests to a classy train journey.

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Change Management – “Yes we can…change starts today” Barack Obama

I exchanged some emails with My US publisher the other day, after the frenzy of Obama’s decisive election win. My publisher was fascinated about the rest of the world’s interest in how the race unfolded over the last few months. I’m reminded of the words of Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Thomas Friedman and his recent book – Hot Flat and Crowded, when he describes how the US cannot help but export both its greatest hopes as well as its greatest fears into the world.

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Performance Management – Why don’t we play to our strengths?

If we were being really honest with ourselves, we’re probably not fantastic at every part of our job. If we were even more honest, we’ve probably learned to fake it a little – or a lot. It’s quite odd that we willingly subject ourselves to the stress of exerting constant effort to either fix, divert attention from or hide some part of our job performance we feel insecure about. This is instead of celebrating and growing the parts of our job that we’re really good at. In fact, we are so concerned that we will be busted for doing something wrong in an area we either don’t like or are weak in, that research by author Marcus Buckingham shows that 89% of us think that battling with our vices is our ticket to success.

It’s not as though we don’t have a choice. A staggering 74% of us feel we could adjust our job duties to suit our strengths. Yet we don’t.

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Personal Responsibility : Waiter – is that “poo” in my icecream?

It’s a sad day when “poo” (or if you’re the sensitive type, excreta or faeces) becomes the central news unfolding around the country. For me the story is less about “poo” and more about personal responsibility. But let’s first go over some of the finer details of how this story unfolded.

A couple of weeks ago, a Sydney family accused a hotel bistro of planting “poo” in their ice-cream after the family had lodged various previous complaints about service. The offending item wasn’t placed into the ice-cream dish in an obvious fashion. It was so discretely placed that it apparently appeared to be an inconspicuous chocolate scoop nestled innocently amongst several other flavours. The item was so well camouflaged, that is was allegedly tasted by a member of the slighted family, so the disgust factor for the public definitely goes up several notches.

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