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Business writing, Confidence, Humanising business, Leadership, Organisational change, Personal Reflections, Purpose, Storytelling, Women
Rethinking Confidence
Some days I don’t have the first idea what I’m doing. I eat cake for breakfast and shout at the children, and my hair looks crap. Some days I look at the length of my to do list, the unanswered emails, the state of my kitchen, and realise I am profoundly unqualified for the role of Living My Own Life....
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Business writing, Humanising business, Leadership, Organisational change, Personal Reflections, Purpose, Storytelling
Rethinking Evolution
I have two daughters, aged 12 and 10, who like to define themselves as pretty much polar opposites of each other (though in truth, they are perhaps more similar than either of them cares to admit.) One of the differences between them is that one loves to bake, and the other loves to cook. Baking Daughter loves to flick through recipe books on a Saturday morning, to find a glossy picture of something delicious. She’ll note down a list of everything she needs, take money and a shopping bag, walk to the shops, come home and lay out all the ingredients. She’ll pre-heat the oven, weigh and measure, whisk and…
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Business writing, Humanising business, Leadership, Organisational change, Personal Reflections, Purpose, Storytelling
Rethinking Belonging
For the first time in my life, I saw the truth … that Love, Meaning and Connection are the ultimate and highest goal to which man can aspire –Viktor Frankl The first big theme that my book focuses on as a source of both risk and opportunity during change is the idea of Belonging. The chapter in my book that tackles this theme, begins with an unequivocal research finding that still blows my mind– namely that the single biggest predictor of our health, happiness and longevity is our sense of connectedness to one another. This past year, we’ve all of us lived the truth of that, have we not? It’s…
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Business writing, Humanising business, Leadership, Organisational change, Personal Reflections, Purpose
An island in an ocean full of change
There’s a George Ezra song, Pretty Shining People, that was released in March 2019, the same month my book was published, and, of course, several months before we had even heard of Covid 19. In the song, Ezra has his character sing: Man, help me out. I fear I’m on an island on an ocean full of change.Can’t bring myself to dive in to an ocean full of change.Am I losing touch?Am I losing touch now? And then, in the lyrics, his friend Sam replies: Why, why, what a terrible time to be aliveif you’re prone to overthinking …. As earworms go, it’s catchy, and as a pithy statement of…
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Ordinary Gorgons
A personal reflection on two women from my past who inspire my future for IWD 2020 At Arup, one of the things we’ve been doing to mark International Women’s Day this year is to share our stories of women who have inspired us. The stories people have shared are exciting and inspiring – groundbreaking engineers, pioneering academics, incredible designers, challenging authors, brilliant teachers, high-flying sisters, wives, friends… I’ve spent a happy few days running a show reel in my mind of the various women, and there are many, who have inspired me and inspire me still. Good friends who do work that matters, quietly and whole-heartedly, stunning and brave artists, friends who…
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Herrings and peanuts
My year of huge change and what it has taught me – part three of a reflection in three parts. In this final part of a three part blog reflecting on my year of transition as a leader, I’d like to focus on understanding. Together with belonging and confidence, which I focused on in previous parts, understanding has proven to be one of the striking components of my BECAUSE model when applied to my own experience. In the chapter on Understanding in my book, I describe navigating my way around a Danish supermarket trying to buy what I need … The simultaneous delight and slightly terrified lostness that comes from…
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Beautiful and Terrible Things
My year of huge change and what it has taught me – part two of a reflection in three parts. In part one of this blog on my first year in a new role, I reflected on the importance of belonging and how to establish it during leadership transition. If belonging was one of the big themes I rumbled with last year, then confidence was the other. In a sense they’re two sides of the same coin; two different ways of exploring the relationship between the firm and the individual as a leader. Belonging starts with the firm, and is about what I could do as an individual and a…
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Taking my own medicine
My year of huge change and what it has taught me – a reflection in three parts Back in the spring, just after the clocks had changed, when the days were warming and stretching and I was living on something other than mince pies and leftover cheese, back when Brexit first didn’t happen, I published my first book. It’s a book that extols the virtues of change. It allows that change is hard. It includes full disclosure that I don’t have a great personal track record in this area – always in love with my present reality, and imagining every conceivable monster in the future. But overall, the book’s central…
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How’s business?
One of the questions that I most hated when each of my children was very little was, “Is (s)he a good baby?” Such a sweet and well intentioned question, really meaning something along the lines of, “Are you alright? Or has the arrival of this small person so turned your world around that you no longer know which way is up?” It was, I think now, really just a way of letting me know I was seen, that the boundaries of me hadn’t dissolved completely in the fog of milk and sleeplessness that so marks this period. But I never knew how to answer it. I didn’t have a baseline…
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I do, we do, you do, review …
Do you? Review? I never used to. You are inundated with requests, am I right? An email from Open Table: ‘How was Enoteca St Paul’s?’ Erm, fine thanks, I’d have said if it wasn’t, and besides, it was yesterday – already just a glimpse of a memory in the bottom of a dark stairwell. Swipe left and delete. A notification from Uber: ‘Thanks for riding with Estefan. Please rate your trip. Please leave a tip. Please pay Estefan a compliment.’ Swipe up and ignore. An email from Amazon Marketplace: “Jenni Emery, did White Marshmallows Bulk Buy – 1 kg bag meet your expectations?” Nnnnggg – perhaps I’ll reply when my mouth isn’t…
