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A scientist set up an experiment with a cage containing five monkeys. Inside the cage, he hung a banana on a string and placed a set of stairs under it. Before long, a monkey started to climb towards the banana. As soon as he touched the stairs, the scientist sprayed all of the other monkeys […][...] read more » Out of the box

The Japanese monkey, Macaca fuscata, had been observed in the wild for a period of over 30 years. In 1952, on the island of Koshima, scientists were providing monkeys with sweet potatoes dropped in the sand. The monkey liked the taste of the raw sweet potatoes, but they found the dirt unpleasant. An 18-month-old female […][...] read more » 100th Monkey Syndrome – How change happens?

We have been hearing all sorts of gloom and doom from the press about the fall-out in the banking sector and consequences of (according to Wikipedia) a “sustained period of careless and inappropriate lending.” However there is another sort of credit we don’t talk enough about or give enough of, the credit for doing something […][...] read more » The Other Credit Crunch

Perverse as it may sound this is a big challenge! There is most of the complexity of a big business and less heads and hands to cope with it. This means that the leaders in a smaller business need to grasp a number of disciplines and ideas that would have specialists in a larger one. […][...] read more » Managing a Smaller Business

I suspect that many of today’s leaders, like me, were brought up watching westerns on TV, listening to John Wayne mouthing phrases like “A man’s got to do, what a man’s go to do..” and watching him ride off into the sunset. This, in a way, typified a generation’s thinking of what strength and leadership […][...] read more » The Value of a Sounding Board

I was talking to a contact at Henley Business School yesterday about a programme called Sustainable Leadership. This led initially got me thinking about Green production / economics1; this is obviously very important but didn’t seem to be the kind of issue I was used to hearing CEOs worrying about. Our conversation moved on and […][...] read more » Leading a Sustainable Business

What Gandhi can teach us about Leadership There can be little doubt that these are testing times for society as a whole and for business in particular. As long as I can remember, the banks in Britain have been considered as paragons of security and probity (remember the song in Mary Poppins that ridiculed the […][...] read more » Time For a New Kind of Leader?

… or an object lesson in miscommunication Here is a true story, only the names have been changed to protect the innocent. Bill is entering the place of work, under his arm is a large painting that is both heavy and unwieldy, his fist is closed beneath the picture. His colleague, Mike, is leaving the […][...] read more » Why doesn’t this Idiot get it!

Communication, is it the air that we breathe? And if so are many of our companies choking to death? How long since you drew a deep lungful of sweet air? This may all seem a fanciful analogy to you but let me develop it for you. Air is vital for our health, indeed, respiration is […][...] read more » Vital Communication

There can be few executives today who have not noticed the rush of interest in . com shares and e-commerce, but there are very few who really understand this area. Most know that they are not ready for this next revolution. If you want to get a rough idea of the scale of revolution we […][...] read more » Are You Dot Competent?