Avoiding the numbing decline of Entropy
A restaurant I used to go to in Cape Town was once a social hotspot. You could rock up there on any given night, and you’d be guaranteed to find it packed, and to find someone you knew amongst the throngs of people at the tables or around the bar. A few years later, things […]
The hidden system that drives Return on Equity
Have you ever considered that revenue can have a quality to it? It can: revenue is not neutral. There are good forms of revenue that move a business forward, and bad forms of revenue that slow a business down. I hadn’t thought of revenue this way before, but it gave me pause for thought […]
You’re standing at the edge of what your business can become
This statement is significant regardless of where your business currently stands. As a leader, you are in a position to unlock potential, from a place of current high performance and market leadership or to return to it if you’re off track. There is always more potential to explore in business, and even in the most […]
A business is too good at absorbing pain
Absorbing pain is noble. I learned that on the rugby fields of South Africa: sometimes you have to run to the next ruck feeling dizzle from making a tackle, or play through stingers to the shoulder, or carrying on playing with loose teeth (or no teeth in my case, as I lost my front four […]
‘Making the turn’ toward career nirvana
I met with a past client for a drink yesterday evening. It had been a few years since we last saw each other, and a lot of water had flown under the bridge: he had remarried, changed jobs and changed cities. When he walked into the restaurant, I could feel that something had changed in […]
Things that you need to let go of to build a Transcendent Business
1. The old ways of business. To build a remarkable business, you need to reimagine every aspect. This includes letting go of any rules and patterns that don’t fit the business that you are building and replacing them with better ones. Anything that makes being part of your current business toilful and forced, processes that […]
Change is not change – pick a lane and mould your CEOship to it
Simply thinking about ‘change’ is intellectually lazy. We’ve all accepted, by now, that change is inevitable. That’s a tired point, and we need to move beyond that. There are many different forms of change, and one is highly differentiated from the other. They have a different tone, a different outcome, a different approach that’s needed, […]
How does a Wise CEO begin setting a new trajectory?
‘The gap between cleverness and wisdom’ was a phrase I heard a few years back that has stayed with me. There are numerous examples of this gap in business and in day-to-day situations. In business, the gap between cleverness and wisdom is often the difference between a business that merely performs and one that transcends. […]
There are multiple versions of a CEO. What have you chosen?
‘The variety of niches individual humans can occupy is immeasurably greater than the niches available to individuals of other species. This is our forte as well as our flaw. One of the distinctive attributes of the human psyche is that it takes wildly diverse and creative shapes. But the capacity of most earlier human cultures […]
How do you build a better, Transcendent Business?
Building a Transcendent Business starts with being aware that there is a superior version of business out there. It involves meeting your business where it is at, in terms of its evolution and reimagining what is possible. Most transcendent businesses have faced a defining moment, and instead of surviving it, they have used it as […]