Category Archives: Leadership

Crowdsourced Reading List on Leadership

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stack-of-booksRecently I started a discussion in the AICD Group on LinkedIn about which books provided members with the greatest inspiration and guidance and I was very surprised by the enthusiasm with which people wanted to call out the books that had helped them with guidance on how to navigate the challenges of management and leadership.  Perhaps books are indeed your friends!

Happy reading!

  • ‘It’s not the big that eat the small – it’s the fast that eat the slow’ by Jason Jennings and Laurence Haughton
  • ‘Rockefeller Habits’ by Verne Harmish
  • ‘The Five Dysfunctions’ of a Team and ‘Getting Naked’ by Pat Lenoncini
  • ‘The Utimate Question 2.0’ by Fred Reichheld
  • ‘Winning Teams’ by Jack Welch
  • ‘Drive’ by Daniel Pink
  • “The Lean Start-up” by Eric Ries
  • ‘Put your heart into it’ by Howard Schultz
  • ‘Leadership and self-deception’ by The Arbinger Institute
  • ‘Matsushita Leadership’ by John P Kotter
  • ‘Conscious Capitalism’ by John Mackey
  • “Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How to Think Differently” by Gregory Berns
  • Capitalism vs Capitalism by Michel Albert
  • ‘Change by Design’ by Tim Brown
  • ‘Outliers’, ‘Blink’ and ‘Tipping Point’ by Malcolm Gladwell
  • “Why Should Anyone Be Led By You” by Goffee and Jones.
  • “First, Break All The Rules” by Markus Buckingham
  • ‘Moments of Truth’ by Jan Carlzon
  • ‘Megatrends’ by John Naisbitt
  • ‘The Complete CEO’ by Peter Fisk, Gary Miles and Mark Thomas
  • ‘Good to Great’ by Jim Collins
  • “Other Peoples Habits: how to use positive feedback to bring out the best in people around you.”by Aubrey C Daniels
  • ‘The Seven Motivations of Life’ by Mark Oliver
  • The Speed of Trust by Stephen M. R. Covey
  • Now discover your strengths – Marcus Buckingham and Donald Clifton
  • Resonant Leadership – Annie McKee and Richard Boyatzis
  • “Leaders” by Warren G Bennis and Burt Nanus
  • “Start with Why” by Simon Sinek

First among equals!

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I was thoroughly humbled last night to be awarded the New South Wales ICT Professional of the Year for 2013 by the Australian Information Industry Association.  While the award itself is a great honour, I was so impressed by many of the other award winners and was excited to see all the great projects happening here in this great state of ours.  There’s a lot more innovation and talent here than we sometimes give ourselves credit for I think.  So I just though I’d list out (below) those other winners as I think they deserve a great deal of praise…

Thanks again to the AIIA for this great privilege, I’m most grateful.

Community

ThoughtWorks for GetUp! and ControlShiftControlShift.

Consumer

IP Payments and Quickflix: Quickflix multi-currency and multi-channel secure payment solution.

Financial

OzForex: White label foreign payment solutions.

Government

Capgemini Australia: Detective HANA.

Health

eHealthWise: THELMA.

Industrial

Geomatic Technologies and RailCorp NSW: GT AIMS in support of RailCorp mechanised track patrol process.

New product

Avoka Technologies: Transact – transaction experience management platform.

Postgraduate tertiary student

University of New South Wales (UNSW) school of computer science and engineering student Liang Tang was recognised for the development of a reconfigurable pipelined coprocessor for multimode communication application.

Research and development

CSIRO ICT centre: Remote mobile tele-assistance platform.

Secondary student project

Oxford Falls Grammar School student Deinyon Davies: In Road.

Sustainability

Object Consulting: Our Green Home.

Tools

Fujitsu Australia and New Zealand: CloudFor-J.

Undergraduate tertiary student

University of Wollongong (UOW) students Jake Shelley, Veronica O’Gorman, Joseph Pons and Andrew Booth: UOW Finder.

ICT educator of the year

UNSW associate professor Richard Buckland.

ICT woman of the year

M&M Consulting Services business improvement consultant Maggie Alexander.

“Cutting your Losses” is not always as easy as it sounds

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BRW Q and A 2012I was very pleased to be featured in October’s CEO Q&A in Business Review Weekly.  The questions were quite personal in nature, rather than about the business but did provide a platform to share some learnings which I hope are useful.

BRW Q and A 2012

Probably the starkest lesson I was able to share was what I learnt around my investments in Babcock and Brown as I, like many others, refused to believe it was tanking and instead  continued to throw good money after bad at it. In retrospect I could have analysed the situation much more accurately if I stripped the emotion from the decision. Like the old analogy about hanging onto a balloon before you decide to let go – the longer you are wrong, the worse it gets.  The writing was on the wall for all to see but it is always a difficult decision to cut your losses and admit you are wrong.    But hindsight is of course a beautiful thing!