Archive
do you lead or manage, and why it matters
I write a lot here on leadership issues; it features a lot in what I do and is something that has fascinated me for many years. This week I was reading in an on line forum where the difference between a manager and a leader was under debate. Read more…
One never goes so far as when one doesn’t know where one is going – Goethe
This one is a bit of a double edged sword maybe. You can work with it from a couple of angles as least. Read more…
why not celebrate your failures?
It is always great to talk about your successes, But for a few months now I have been writing about projects where have had problems, where we made mistakes, didn’t cover all of the angles, made assumptions or maybe took our eye off the ball types of scenario. Read more…
how to influence, or even join, the top team
In many of the business specialisms we talk about improving our influence in the boardroom; we want to have that presence amongst the movers and shakers and have a place at the top table, but how do we get there? Read more…
“It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit”
These words are attributed to Harry S Truman, the 33rd President of the United States of America and there is an obvious logic to them. Read more…
to plan or not to plan
“We need a plan” is a fairly obvious statement before you start any endeavour and with a decent plan in place there is little excuse for not succeeding; “I love it when a plan comes together” I think Hannibal Smith used to say in each A Team episode, but what about when a plan goes off the rails, or if you don’t have a plan? Read more…
the importance of understanding money
I wrote in one of my books about probably the best piece of business advice that I ever had came not in a work context, but from the father of a young lady who I was about to take out on a date. Read more…
don’t fear failure; get out there and compete
Somewhere amongst all my various scribbling is a line about my successes having shaped me, but it being my failures that have made me. It is a play on the Einstein quote along the lines people who haven’t made a mistake haven’t tried anything, but I do believe that it is the things that I’ve done wrong, or not well enough, that I’ve truly learned from. Read more…
musings on poor procurement and management on the soccer front
Although I am not a close follower of football these days, the nonsense of making a stadium all seater in the interests of safety and then allowing everyone to stand up is enough to put me off, and then there are those ridiculous shorts! But I do keep a passing interest, and a couple of things caught my attention last week. Read more…
musings on the role of FM
It is almost 45 years since I left school and went to work, ironically in some ways, in what we might now call FM as I was taken on as a trainee building surveyor for my first proper job in the back end of the sixties. Whilst most of what we dealt with was domestic property it did give me an introduction to a range of commercial properties from, shops through industrial buildings and on to farms and through that a graphic understanding of the need to maintain the asset and the issues of prioritising expenditure, especially when money is scarce. Understanding that linkage between the premises and the business should be at the heart of the debate over the future of the FM profession because there is always a driver there. At the simplest level this can be the the way an arable farmer will have different priorities to a livestock farmer, or the way that a shopkeeper will spend more on front of house than in their stockroom, but you can scale this principle up and apply it to Facilities Management as we now know it. Read more…
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the Monday Musings column from that consultant bloke 