blackswan

Engaging our employees is a critically important activity for any leader, yet we still encounter leaders who come from the command and control school of leadership and operate on the basis that because they are more senior and more experienced then they know the answers and simply need to direct their teams to operate in a given way to deliver the required results....

Darrell Mann looks at the theroy of Open Innovation (OI) concept. Present tough, unsolved problems to extremely large numbers of the world's most inventive minds and chances are someone, somewhere may either already have a solution or the wherewithal to deliver a solution.

Darrell Mann looks at how can people who earn their living by teaching people to be creative turn out to be so un-creative? As is so often the case, the problem centres around a poor definition of what we mean when we talk about ‘creativity'.

In this article the author looks at the ashes test cricket matches between England and Australia. Looking at Australia mourns and England's wins.

Darrell Mann looks at generational toy fads that have seen different generations grow up with the same toys and the innovation reason for this.

Darrell Mann spend's a fairly large proportion of my time these days feeling embarrassed to be British. Trying to get home before Christmas to find that the biggest airport in the country was ‘closed', leaving tens of thousands of people stranded probably didn't help my mood. Watching the news over the Christmas period didn't help much either. It seems like wherever he looks our systems don't work anymore.

My father in law spent his whole life waiting for retirement. I, on the other hand, hate the thoughts of retirement and think how very lucky I am to keep working at what I enjoy right up until the day I leave this earth.

Let's be honest. As leaders how do we stay sane in an insane job? Too busy to read. Too busy to learn. Too busy on the treadmill when the speed is being set by others.

As the winter weather tightens its grip once again, the inevitable transport chaos a light-dusting of snow brings will inevitably lead to a large increase in people being unable, or unwilling to make the journey to their place of work.

It is axiomatic that many change initiatives fail and yet we tend to plough on regardless in the hope that this time it will work out fine. There are, of course, many reasons why change tends to fail and in this series of articles I want to explore some of these reasons and how we can mitigate the risk of failure by adopting a different perspective.