I am an Australian who lives in France, and has worked and lived on three continents, and drawn inspiration for every location. Through this, I have developed a fascination about the way we all think in creatively different ways about the same things. All this cross-referencing has shown me that all responses to the need for change go better with a base of a few things: trust in your own people and those whose businesses support yours, discovery of assets hidden in plain sight, and fun. All these books share these themes. I hope they inspire you to think more creatively and to constantly value the value of values.
I wrote...
SWIVEL Again: Refocus Your Business for a Fast Changing World
As a Fellow of the Strategic Doing Institute, I have used this method in diverse locations, sectors, and with private and public sector groups, and it is the best method of empowerment I have yet to see.
For anyone who is facing ‘wicked problems’—those that are complex, interwoven, and layered—and where no single solution will work, this book is the guide needed.
Yo Yo Ma wrote the foreword after watching how the methodology described quickly bought ideas to action. Communities, industries, and businesses—and me—use the four questions and 10 rules of Strategic Doing to move forward to action—and the results speak for themselves.
Complex challenges are all around us-they impact our companies, our communities, and our planet. This complexity and the emergence of networks is changing the practice of strategic management. Today's leaders need to understand how to design and guide complex collaborations to accelerate innovation and change-collaborations that cross boundaries both inside and outside organizations.
Strategic Doing introduces you to the new disciplines of agile strategy and collaborative leadership. You'll learn how to design and guide complex collaborations by following a discipline of simple rules that you won't find anywhere else.
Although we value order and try to group things logically, one man’s logic is another man’s chaos.
I love the book because it challenges us to think about things we take for granted and the importance of discovery rather than finding. As Weinberger says: A topic is not a domain with edges. It is how passion focuses itself.
I agree absolutely that knowledge is not in our heads—but between us. Think of the white spaces on the org chart: that is where things happen.
Love this: Research shows that messiness begins within and to think without mess is to ”imagine thinking the way computers think—which is to say, to imagine not thinking at all.”
Business visionary and bestselling author David Weinberger charts how as business, politics, science, and media move online, the rules of the physical world - in which everything has a place - are upended. In the digital world, everything has its places, with transformative effects: Information is now a social asset and should be made public, for anyone to link, organize, and make more valuable; There's no such thing as "too much" information. More information gives people the hooks to find what they need; Messiness is a digital virtue, leading to new ideas, efficiency, and social knowledge; Authorities are less important…
I love the fact that I had confirmation that what your data is telling you is probably not what it seems.
This book brilliantly explains the buzzword vocabulary of financial “experts” and what the data that goes with those buzzwords actually show. It’s a wonderfully simple explanation of each term with examples of how skewed the bar graph may be and why, and where real value lies and how to find it.
I found new insights on how to better analyse customer behaviour—without the fancy graphs—and suggestions of what to do about it.
Everywhere you look people are talking about data.
Buzzwords abound - 'data science', 'machine learning','artificial intelligence'. But what does any of it really mean, and most importantly what does it mean for your business?
Long-established businesses in many industries find themselves competing with new entrants built entirely on data and analytics. This ground-breaking new book levels the playing field in dramatic fashion.
The Average is Always Wrong is a completely pragmatic and hands-on guide to harnessing data to transform your business for the better.
Experienced CEO and CMO Ian Shepherd takes you behind the jargon and puts together a powerful…
Not many guides to leaders written in 1987 are still as pertinent today as then. This little book has sold more than 800,000 copies—and I have seen its lessons in how a Herman Miller team went above and beyond for a charity. That was before I read the book.
Herman Miller (think iconic Eames Chair), thrives on the philosophy of its leader distilled here. It has created an empowered organisation where each person has the opportunity to be their best—and be accountable.
This is a book I read and re-read. It spells out why values matter and how innovation happens.
In what has become a bible for the business world, the successful former CEO of Herman Miller, Inc., explores how executives and managers can learn the leadership skills that build a better, more profitable organization.
Leadership Is an Art has long been a must-read not only within the business community but also in professions ranging from academia to medical practices, to the political arena. First published in 1989, the book has sold more than 800,000 copies in hardcover and paperback. This revised edition brings Max De Pree’s timeless words and practical philosophy to a new generation of readers.
Put simply, it summarises the former four and has gifted me “So What?” When ‘Command and Control’ was recognised as an obsolete model for a modern army, the two authors had the task of rethinking what that would mean and how to accomplish something better.
When leading an organisation whose budget has been slashed, but you cannot lose the capacity to effectively respond, it focuses the mind. As the authors say, we must change the way we change.
There is a clue in the title. The recipe is clear and is anything but a dry narrative. It shows how the future will be created by positive action and empowered teams—not by slogans or strategies—but by action.
Since the end of the Cold War, the United States Army has been reengineered and downsized more thoroughly than any other business. In the early 1990s, General Sullivan, army chief of staff, and Colonel Harper, his key strategic planner, took the post-Cold War army into the Information Age. Faced with a 40 percent reduction in staff and funding, they focused on new peacetime missions, dismantled a cumbersome bureaucracy, reinvented procedures, and set the guidelines for achieving a vast array of new goals.
Hope Is Not a Method explains how they did it and shows how their experience is extremely relevant…
I wrote SWIVEL Again as follow on from my book written during Covid lockdown as a guide to business leaders emerging to a changed world.
SWIVEL Again has the same sense of urgency for any business leader as the world tilted on its axis in 2025. The cause? The impact of radical new technologies arriving at the same time as those resulting from sudden changes in world trust relationships. The message is that unless we empower our own teams, refocus our core offer, and adjust our systems to be responsive, we will miss the opportunities and be damaged by the negatives. It is a call to value the value of values, not shed staff, and find the hidden assets within.
