This is a tough year for people with friggatriskaidekaphobia*, which is, yes, a fear of Friday the 13th. 2026 will have three February March November So two down and one to go! *Apologies if you have hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia, or a fear of long words.

“It’s no longer just about taking a course for my career development,” he said in our first session. He’s a highly qualified engineer, has moved across roles and sites, built a strong track record, and by most measures doesn’t need more training, but he knew something still felt unfinished. Not a gap in knowledge, not a lack of experience, just a sense that more courses weren’t going to move things forward in the way they once did. As we talked, it became clearer that he wasn

I try to close meetings on time. A meeting that runs long sends a message about how we value other people’s time. When the clock slips past the end without acknowledgement, the room begins to thin out mentally even if everyone is still seated. People start thinking about the next call, the next task, the next commitment they are now late for. And finishing on time respects the invisible chain of meetings that follows yours. Finishing on time also forces clarity. When a meeti

People spend hours preparing slides for the meeting (or minutes in Gamma or Genspark or Co-pilot now), but very few spend time preparing the people in the meeting. The best sellers and leaders I’ve worked with don’t rely on the meeting to get the approval. Before the meeting they’ve already done the bulk of the work; in side conversations; by understanding where the resistance sits; by shaping the message for the people who matter; by testing and evolving the idea. They’ve

MBWA, the idea popularized by Tom Peters that leaders should get out from behind their desks and stay close to what is really happening . It’s usually described as being visible, accessible, and connected. That matters more than ever with the seeming acceleration of everything, but it feels incomplete. Because what I notice in my own day does not feel like managing. It feels like a series of small coaching moments happening in motion. Many are easy to miss. A quick question a

Or the Monday Hangover You Didn’t Drink For With the clocks changing around me (in Singapore we don't change clocks twice a year) I learned about a new thing and I wanted to share it. It’s called social jet lag, and the thing that struck me is that most of us are living with it without ever naming it. Jet lag is seen as something that happens when we cross time zones, stepping off a plane and feeling out of sync with the day around us. Social jet lag is more subtle than tha

We live inside our own normal and with the busyness, repetition and hustle, and at a point it stops feeling special. About 30 years ago, I worked on a project when I lived in Chicago, and it required travel to New York on a regular basis. Twice monthly flight, airport lounges, taking the Queensboro bridge into the city at 8 O'clock in the morning, same car service waiting on arrival taking me back into the office. And at the time, that life seemed like it was all logistics,

There’s a moment in many meetings where we speak not to add value, but to fill space, covering nerves, masking gaps, or getting ahead of objections, and the more we say, the less we mean. So how about saying nothing and listening instead? In Asia, silence isn’t emptiness, often it is respect. And many times that silence is masking deep thinking. And from personal experience silence can also be restraint. So the question morphs from “Should I speak?” to “Will this add some

The open road, with music to match! The open road, with music to match!

Kings Park, Botanic garden, WA

It's like smelling the roses, but for eyes Two Rocks Lagoon, WA And some other colours (before grilling)

Sugar Loaf Rock, WA Timing your days around the rhythms of nature is often awe inspiring. Sunset at Sugar Loaf Rock

Meelup Beach Coastline, WA

Waking up to watch the sun is priceless Sunrise over Cape Naturaliste, WA

I'm in Australia on holiday with my family this week so there are fewer posts about business. Instead, here's a picture of a beach Scarborough Beach WA

I recently wrote about derived prompts and got instant feedback from several readers. Most was along the lines of " all of these assume there is context already present - how do you suggest someone give context ahead of each prompt? " Context matters because You have knowledge the model doesn't — your audience, your history, your constraints, your definition of "good." Context is the mechanism for injecting that judgment. Without it, the model substitutes its own generic defa

36 short conversations, some interesting signals I spent a couple of days at an offsite in Rome speaking with high performers across the company I work for. Not long interviews just two or three minutes each. Thirty-six in total. Each person was shown the same card with seven questions and asked to choose a few to respond to. Most respondents started with one question and then drifted, naturally, into others. The responses were unpolished, immediate, and grounded in lived exp

I read for pleasure because it steadies me. When there is no outcome attached, no insight to extract and no summary to produce, reading becomes something slower and more absorbing, a way of spending time inside another mind or another world without needing to turn it into something useful straight away. That kind of reading strengthens attention in ways that fragmented scrolling never will, because you stay with a story or an argument long enough for it to shape you, and over

A field note on using AI for more than speed I use AI every day. For work, planning, thinking, even for my journaling. Over time, that has led me into a familiar pattern. I find, save, test and tweak prompts. Sometimes I go looking for them on purpose. Sometimes I stumble across them while searching for better ways to think something through. Some are useful immediately. Some are clever but thin. Some work once and then never again. Some seem impressive until you realise th

At this stage of my career I travel for work much less than I once did. There was a period when flights, hotel rooms, and airport lounges were simply part of the rhythm of the job. Cities blurred together a little and the travel itself felt like the price you paid to do the work that mattered. Now that it happens less often, I find that I experience those trips quite differently. Part of that shift comes from the Year of Noticing , and part of it comes from the idea of going