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Rethinking Understanding
Almost all of us have surely, over the past year, been sucked into the impossible game of ‘pandemic trumps’. Whose wifi is worst? Whose pet the most disruptive? Is it better to be locked down in the city or in the countryside? Alone or with small children? Who has looked enviously while perched on the end of their bed with…
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Agility, Business writing, Humanising business, Leadership, Organisational change, Personal Reflections, Purpose, Storytelling
Rethinking Agility
My fifteen year old son is a goalkeeper. During lockdown, his training has been via zoom calls and has involved setting up ludicrous obstacle courses across the living room, so that he can practise changing direction in a fraction of a second, or leaping from a standing start onto a high box. He is working on his agility – the…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
