It was the smell I noticed first. Standing at the checkout in a supermarket in Berlin waiting to pay for my breakfast, it enveloped me like an olfactory force-field of reheated human secretions. It didn’t take long to locate the source. In front of me, a man of my age...
Last night I scattered my father’s ashes on the waters of the Ganges at Varanasi, the holy city to which Hindus come to die and end the cycle of death and rebirth. India had exerted an ancestral pull on my dad his whole life but he’d never managed to...
It’s the 4th of February today. Set any new resolutions at the beginning of this month? I didn’t think so. Strange how we do that in January, but in February not so much. Still, I have to ask: how did you do? In January, I mean. Research shows that although millions...
It’s a four-letter word. A bad ‘un. So awful is this word that its use has been de facto banished from organizational discourse. And yet the feeling this word describes is probably the biggest barrier there is to getting game-changing things done. It lurks in every...
At a dinner party recently, the question began to circulate. I could feel it coming my way, and had my usual habits at the ready–mumbling something about “a sort of executive coaching” or “productivity training”, suitably vague to move...
Scalability is the holy grail of good business practice–both for big companies looking to get bigger, and one-person bands just starting out. The Getting Things Done (GTD®) method is an extremely powerful approach to “scale” an individual’s...
