Category: Leadership Development

Cornwall Park

Cornwall Park

Cornwall Park was gifted to the people of New Zealand in 1901 by John Logan Campbell. It’s my favourite city park – and it doesn’t hurt that I’m within striking distance – for a good walk. I was there over the weekend after dark for a 10 kilometre loop out and back home.

Last year I attended a wonderful talk by the lead landscape architect, Thomas Woltz, engaged by the Park’s Trust Board, to oversee a 100 year transformation. Excitingly some of the projects are already underway. At the Manukau Road end of the Park, which I suspect many people don’t think of as an entrance to the Park, the statue and surrounds have been lovingly restored and invigorated.

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From Manukau Road through to the Green Lane entrance past the sport’s grounds it’s a great route that I never tire of. Cornwall Park “proper” (my phrase) is full of mature trees, farmland, rock walls and Twin Oaks Drive. There’s nothing quite like it.

At night it’s completely unlit which is rare in the city and ideal for deep thought.

Watch out for sheep on night patrols though!

What better way to build resilience?

Stephen

 

M

A real life M visited PwC recently. That’s all I can say really!

But there were a few things I was authorised to mention just to my readers here.

There were a lot of questions about technology and talk about the current geopolitical environment.

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What I noticed were some familiar themes from this seasoned security professional, that struck both a leadership and fraud prevention chord with me.

Sir John spoke about training and knowing your people as key factors that underpin an organisation (or country)’s security.  Quite basic things that you only notice you’ve overlooked them when something goes wrong.

He talked about focussing your security efforts on working out what is really valuable to your organisation, and then concentrating on protecting those assets.

Finally, he emphasised that security at an organisation begins with the leadership – it must be a strategic leadership responsibility – unless security of intellectual assets is taken seriously from the top – then it won’t receive the attention it needs.

Sir John Scarlett was asked about North Korea and its cyber attacks.  Technology has been a great leveler for espionage, he said, and I know this to be the case for fraud too:  small players in faraway places are just as likely to be a threat to your company as the local crooks.

He had some other messages about Russia, China, US, sharing of information between countries and 9/11, but in case that’s top secret I better save that for another day.

Stephen

Note:

Sir John Scarlett, the former head of the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) spoke at a breakfast function at PwC recently.  M is the fictional head of MI6 from Ian Fleming’s James Bond. In the movie Skyfall, M is revealed to be short for Emma. Lieutenant Colonel Gareth Mallory takes over from M played by Dame Judi Dench at the end of the film, assumes the moniker M and reappears in Spectre.

Being late

Being late

If you’re like me you get your energy as the deadline approaches. Creativity kicks in and you do your best work under pressure. Every leadership programme or workshop I facilitate has people just like me in this respect. They are quite proud of what they can do in a short time frame and how much spare time they have for other things.

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Dig a little deeper and most late starters have a level of stress that they know they could do without. Meeting work and other’s deadlines, finding no contingency time.

I (and others) try and trick me into leaving with enough time for appointments by putting in fake early starting times. It seldom works as I know. The other day I had a medical appointment. I arrived 15 minutes early thinking good, the fake entry worked. Turned out I was 45 minutes early as I’d faked my own fake time! So I settled into do some work and ten minutes later was called and was all done and out in another 10 minutes.

It was a surprisingly refreshing experience for me. There’s a good chance you’ll be thinking that this is normal. True for many people, but not for everyone.

You see them running into meetings late, functions at the last moment, joking at personal appointments about the traffic and so on.

If you get your energy and creativity from the deadline, I reckon hold on to that but look over the fence and for everything else find some calm and order in early arriving and getting started when you, deep down, know you should!

For an entertaining but ultimately very serious version of my epiphany try this Ted Talk. Even if you don’t think this is you, watch right to the end – it might be!

Stephen

A scarf

A scarf

I posted my last blog “I just wanted to hug her” at 12.48pm on 15 March, after boarding a regular flight from Wellington back home to Auckland. It talked of the events of that morning, and I felt satisfied that we’d had a good event, and that I’d been able to blog so promptly.

The doors then closed and by the time the flight landed in Auckland over 40 innocent people had been murdered at the Al Noor Mosque, and as I mounted my motorcycle to head up Highway 20A to the city, several more people were killed at the Linwood Islamic Centre.

Just over the road and around the corner at Linwood Avenue Primary School in the early seventies our class wrote to the then prime minister, Norm Kirk, to suggest that we have a holiday on his birthday. I have no idea what inspired us to write the letter, but I do recall we received a gracious reply, thanking us for the suggestion. I’m not sure what he thanked us for actually, but with the benefit of hindsight, it must have been something about his leadership that we had noticed.

Someone said to me today that because our prime minister wore a scarf while mourning with the Muslim community these last two weeks, she feels differently about Muslim women. It’s made quite a difference, she said, something she said she can’t clearly articulate but it’s been very healing for her. And she hasn’t been a fan of the prime minister at all.

I can’t remember what we saw in Norm Kirk, but my impression of him was a great leader, who sought change for good.

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Leadership is about bringing people together for a common purpose.

To me the scarf was as simple as that. Powerful.

Stephen