Who do you trust? If you’re like millions of other Australians, you don’t trust politicians, big banks or the media. In fact, mistrust of key institutions continues to grow, perpetuating a trend that started in the late 1960s [1, 2]. This lack of trust continues to gain attention, and there’s...
Read More
Do you want a pay rise but are too afraid to ask? It doesn’t need to be this way. Indeed, it can be a relaxed and rewarding process. Here’s some tips from experience to make it a positive experience. Competing pressures on wages We find ourselves in a time of...
Read More
What are your people passionate about? Do you know? What might be possible if you unleashed their latent talents? Indeed, what might be the cost if you don’t? For many years, I worked with one of Australia’s great businesses. SKM, a professional services firm with some 10,000 people around the...
Read More
Humans are amazing. We’re capable of orchestrating moving music, creating beautiful structures and deconstructing the human genome. Why then, when we possess such constructive capabilities, do governments find themselves grasping for answers, businesses struggling to grow, and communities feeling insecure and mistrustful of public and private sector leaders alike? In...
Read More
Practical engineering solutions may be the key to transcending the political gridlock that confounds the energy-climate crisis. Several days ago, Matthew Warren, chief executive of the Australian Energy Council, warned “We now risk rolling into a second decade of energy policy uncertainty. This could be catastrophic for the cost and...
Read More
“How did I get here?” asked the reluctantly departing CEO. “How did we get here?” question citizens in a Brexit-Trump world. “What now?” is their coupled question. A growing suite of societal crises threaten to fracture governments, businesses and communities. Yet perhaps this is a natural part of our collective...
Read More
From infancy we’ve learnt values, ideas and social rules through stories. This schooling has occurred for millennia. Today, some of these stories are being questioned. Leaders need to understand this dynamic and just how important stories are to sustaining success. In 2011, history professor Yuval Noah Harari published his book...
Read More
An upcoming executive conference promises to shed powerful insights into current, under-played challenges of the fourth industrial revolution for engineering executives and company directors. What follows is a small component of the under-pinning research and analysis that informs the conference dialogue. In the early 1990s I was a researcher, exploring...
Read More
More money won’t address the shortfall of good infrastructure projects. Better planning and governance arrangements will help, but a shift in mind-sets is the key. Many people in the infrastructure ‘community’ are captured in a false narrative and mind-set. Better approaches are being overlooked as effort goes into solving the...
Read More
Executives in the infrastructure sector can literally design their way to success. But their language and actions reveal that they don’t believe this to be true. This is despite real evidence to the contrary. Until they display the humility to test their basic assumptions, many millions of dollars will continue...
Read More