I was recently invited to participate in the inaugural three-day training for International project management from the International Association of Project Managers (IAPM) in Röthenbach, near Nürnberg, Germany. On the first morning of the trainin… [more]

In my experience, most researchers are looking for a more productive environment that is conducive to performing great work. In most cases, the current structure and dynamics of research groups does not help them to meet this aspiration. In an earli… [more]

I often hear from clients about the side effects caused by the tension between their desire to collaborate and their people’s need for individual success.  These can take the form of people hiding data from their colleagues, or not putting them in… [more]

This week's article is an interview with Don Fornes, CEO of Software Advice. His blog A Million Little Wins offers perspectives on how to build a business. Don connected with me after I published 7 ways to improve your meetings in August. I asked Don… [more]

When discussing with clients how to lead their staff, one question that arises often is, how much initiative should my people show? In their classic HBR article, Management Time: Who's Got the Monkey? Oncken and Wass lay out a five-level scale of ma… [more]

Very few people like to have to say “please listen: my project is a dog’s dinner” and, in many organizations, the culture of project management discourages raising such red flags. Gretchen Gavett recently published an article, “The hidden fa… [more]

Leadership has moved on since the time of the Roman emperors and nowadays leaders need to be able to rely on their communication skills to influence others to ensure that goals are met. A few years ago I published a blog article He wants Subjects, V… [more]

A key characteristic for leaders is to be able to understand and deal with different types of people or characters. In my work I make use of a model of personality, the Enneagram, that my clients find useful in understanding themselves and their coll… [more]

One recent Sunday evening I stumbled across Yannis Simonides’s performance in the one-man show Socrates Now in Athens. I had decided to visit Athens on my way back from delivering a to-day leadership programme for the Nucleosome4D network, as a cu… [more]

Leadership is another of those things that people find hard to define, but can recognise it when they see it. I recently googled “leadership definition” and got 386 million hits, which indicates there are many definitions out there.  A dictionar… [more]

  Meetings are the bedrock of getting things done in organizations, or at least they could be. Despite all the practice we get, most people complain about meeting quality. Don’t expect them to improve on their own. Eric Barker’s Ba… [more]

Last August, I was invited to run a mini-workshop at a post-doc retreat in the Swiss Alps. The beautiful landscape was conducive to good and creative work. One of the workshop topics was what career options are open to post-docs who do not want to … [more]

After-hours at a recent workshop, the conversation went slightly off the beaten track and people began to swap stories about what they learned from different challenging or funny moments in their careers. Several times, the topic of resilience ca… [more]

I recently wrote about the 24/7 lab – one model for a successful research lab. The original Nature article about the lab generated a lot of discussion, including a thoughtful response in Nature from Julie Overbaugh. For those whose working s… [more]