Writings on various topics (mostly technical) from Oliver Hookins and Angela Collins. We currently reside in Sydney after almost a decade in Berlin, have three kids, and have far too little time to really justify having a blog.
Reinventing Organizations by Frederic Laloux. Wow, what a book. I've had this sitting on the bookshelf for a couple of years and finally got around to reading it in the last couple of months. When it comes to books around the theme of management, the most interesting books are the ones that completely challenge and change my existing ways of thinking, or the ones that fully resonate and amplify…
Who Moved My Cheese? by Dr Spencer Johnson is another book mentioned to me last year (I think by my manager). It sounds like a book I already knew about, but maybe that is because of the conventional and obvious sounding title. And the content is obvious, in many ways - it's an allegory for change management.
As the tale goes, four mice with strange names are feasting on cheese and then the…
One Minute Mentoring by Ken Blanchard and Claire Diaz-Ortiz is one of the well-respected One Minute Manager series by Ken Blanchard. Ken Blanchard himself has started a series of companies that specialise in management training and techniques - such as Situational Leadership II.
I still have it on my list to read the original One Minute Manager, and assumed it was just a "basics" guide to the…
Turn The Ship Around by L. David Marquet is something that had been on my radar (no pun intended) for some time, but was also recommended to me early last year by my then manager. The context was - how to delegate more in the journey in leadership to higher levels of management. I think at the time I was trying to come to grips with the team I had at the time, which was doing a lot of difficult…
Another book completed from the never-ending list: Zero to One by Peter Thiel. Not sure how this ended up on the list but I guess it's a seminal text when considering tech startups, which have featured pretty solidly in my career.
I probably saw it on the shelf at one of the companies I worked, and thought it deserved a read. In any case, I expected something more about founding and running…
My blog count for last year was woefully low, and I was struggling to think of what was worthwhile to write about. As I mentioned last time, I've been slowly getting through my management/leadership reading list and while I don't think I have the time or energy to write full book reviews (at least, full enough to do the titles justice) I would like to write something.
So here it is: the first of…
Oh dear, it's been another long time since my last post. To be fair, this year has been very hectic. Earlier in the year I was focussing a lot more on spending my commutes meditating (somewhat successfully), but recently I've found that reading on the train and in whatever free time I can scrape together has almost the same effect - so I don't mind meditating less.
When I was in primary school I took part regularly in the MS Read-a-thon - much less for the fundraising aspect as for the reading aspect. I was a mad reader. I think in the month or so of the read-a-thon I managed one year to crank through around 35 books. Admittedly these weren't exactly Ulysses-sized or complexity, but I think that's a…
Well, I've certainly had a lot less free time to write blog posts recently. I don't even have my actual desktop computer back in operation yet (the screen was cracked in transit). We have finally moved into an apartment in Sydney and life is returning to some definition of normal. With three kids and a new job there is a lot to balance, and not a lot of time for many things.
That being said, I've…
It's 2019! Or so they say - I'm not very inclined to believe it, as most days seem like a dream. You know that kind of dream, where you are in the house where you live (or perhaps where you grew up), but you somehow know within you that it's not your house? This is the life I'm living at the moment.
We've been living in Berlin, Germany, since 2009 and have now - after just over nine years - moved back to Sydney, Australia. We've visited, of course, in the intervening years (at increasing cost as our children increased in number and age), but there's a distinct difference between coming back for a few weeks as some kind of bizarro tourist versus coming back to actually live here. The city itself has changed, we have changed - we left as an unmarried couple with a…
Picture the scene: you have a new project to start working on and deliver in a relatively short amount of time. You have done lots of research, know the problem to be solved, have worked diligently on whittling down the scope to just the bare elements that will prove or disprove the utility of the idea. You know how long it will take to build a first iteration, have a pretty good idea of how to…