This article is brought to you, as Sesame Street says, by the letter M. In fact, by three sets of the letter M. And by the idea of focus.
At the start of the year I wrote about focus, including one of my favourite quotes: "Your focus determines your reality". Cal Newport, author of Deep Work, has called focus a "super power" for working in the 21st Century economy where we daily face the challenge of information overload and constant distraction. Compounding this...

"What looks like a people problem is often a situation problem." This simple statement from Chip and Dan Heath's book Switch: How to change things when change is hard, is a useful reminder about not falling prey to easy assumptions about people's performance. Have your ever experienced the frustration of setting up a new approach (usually designed to be more efficient) only to have it resisted or ignored? (Shifts in records and reporting processe, attempts to crea...

Energy is a hot topic these days. We hear and read about energy shortages, about alternative energy sources and about the spiralling demand for energy. It's also a hot topic at the personal and organisational level. The Energy Project, in a survey of 150,000 people, found that "74% of employees are experiencing a personal energy crisis". That's worrying, but not surprising, given the increasing demands, uncertainty and stresses many of us face. Energy is critical ...

  This little card was a timely reminder for me; maybe it will be for you too. The challenge, of course, is how? How do you manage to run your day and not let it run you? Logically, you have to find a way to get in front of things. So, here are three simple suggestions for increasing the amount of each day that you run. Start mindfully. We know that mindset is crucial to performance. So it makes sense to get that right first thing. Even if it's only ten minutes at the sta...

There's an African proverb that says: "If you want to go fast, travel alone. If you want to go far, travel together". It goes to the heart of working cooperatively and collaboratively. We know that together we can achieve more. And we know that working together requires the essential ingredient of trust. It's essential for team performance, for collaboration and for managing effective change. But there are a couple of real challenges to this ideal. One is this sor...