Lessons from the ‘Die Hard is/isn’t a Christmas Movie’ debate

I haven't written a post for some time now, but it somehow felt important to address the key debate of this time of year: "Is Die Hard a Christmas movie?". I'm specifically addressing the ongoing disagreement in this post, and what it says about people and our ability to feel and rationalise something to be …

Fairness, Silos & The Proximity Problem

Why proximity breeds unfairness

The Nature of Your Jobs

For long time readers (that's both of you) my aversion to Apple as an organisation and the near cult of Steve Jobs is well documented. However, I'm also pretty 'whole of market' about where I get my wisdom - because I think learning is so precious that you should try and grab it wherever you …

What else would need to change…

I'm on a flight to Aberdeen to chat to some folk about the future of work. I've just read a piece by Tim Harford in the on board magazine about how we ignore less glamorous inventions in favour of exciting and more obviously revolutionary technology. Barbed wire and shopping containers. We undervalue the change those …

Customer focus, leadership visits and police cars

I'm working up in London a fair bit at the moment and most days I head for sushi at the itsu on Sackville Street. The staff there are warm, welcoming, smiley, prompt, efficient and the store/restaurant always looks great. They remember me, they engage and they never do anything but enhance my day. The food is …

25 Leadership Quotes you’ve never heard

A few weeks ago I checked my timeline on Twitter and the entire page was just leadership soundbites. Some had been put onto an attractive background to make them look more important, some had been attributed to Aristotle or Einstein to make them seem more important - but essentially it was a hint that there was …

5 essential HR speedreads (pt 1)

The 5 books I aim to cover in these blogs are all worth a read. To make things faster (and probably shallower for you) I'm going to give you a short summary each books and then key lessons for HR - so it's almost like you don't have to read them. Obviously I would recommend …

HR Social – Unicorns, rainbows and pixies

Emotivism - I feel a bit bored of social media without the fighting Prescriptivism - everyone should fight, because I'm a bit bored of social media Yes, it's a trite summary of someone else's position - but it's provocative, likely to start an argument and possibly upsetting so it's actually ok. -------------- Yesterday I read …

Simple things – language and HR

It isn't that hard. I'm not saying it's easy, but the things we do actually aren't rocket science. Unless you are currently a very involved Business Partner for NASA ( in which case, apologies - but it's hardly brain surgery). It does seem that s all too often we require the comfort blanket of credibility …

HR as a wartime consigliere

In the last Blog I wrote about Star Wars - and in my first I wrote about Jaws. The plan is to keep struggling through films (and other things) until I end up scraping the bottom of the media barrel, so feel free to stop reading when I start producing articles with titles like lessons …