Inspiration comes from the playground that is the French Alps today. Skiing is another great metaphor for life. You never know what’s round the corner. It’s an oxymoron: challenging and fun. It’s uncertain: you can’t control the weather or the [...] Read more

Creativity is one of our greatest assets as human beings.  It comes with the species.  It is creativity that lies at the heart of our greatest achievements – whether it is flying to the moon, Facebook or filo pastry. All [...] Read more

We all know the result of the race between the hare and the tortoise. The hare thinks he’s got it locked up. Something similar happened between the New Zealand and Indian cricket teams yesterday. Few believed the Kiwis could beat [...] Read more

This week, I was reminded of one of Dale Carnegie’s key influencing tools: Let the other person feel that an idea is theirs. When this is done skilfully and with integrity, we get the results we are looking fast and [...] Read more

Occasionally you read a book where the words capture your imagination.  I just read ‘An American Marriage’ by Tayari Jones, which did just that.  One line really struck me: ‘It’s like eating a butterscotch still sealed in the wrapper.’ Sometimes, [...] Read more

Years ago, my friend and I went to the Royal Institution on Albemarle Street in Mayfair for a lecture by Daniel Goleman, the award-winning psychologist who penned the best selling book ‘Emotional Intelligence’. During the Q&A at the end of [...] Read more

It’s D-Day.  So it seems fitting to talk about freedom. Yesterday, the Queen described the wartime generation as resilient, calling for ‘a revival of spirit, a new unconquerable resolve’. For those of us who are not part of the wartime [...] Read more

Let me be blunt. Most people do not listen. Yes, Harriet Lerner, if only people listened as passionately as they talked. If only. Sigh. We have to remember that fact whenever we are speaking. Whether we are on the phone, [...] Read more