National Learning Institute

For the last 20 years I've watched a crop of young people identified in the late 1980s as ‘high potential leaders' in IBM Australia develop into top business leaders. One of the crop became a global executive with Microsoft, one is currently the CEO of IBM Australia and one is the CEO of Australia's largest telco.

Back then we worked on a...

Barely a month goes by without some new corporate scandal breaking across the media. But do the executives of these companies think that people will not find out what they have been up to? And from a leadership perspective, what type of culture does such behaviour engender within an organisation?

LG Electronics, one of the world’s largest...

What has management learnt from the global economic crisis (GEC) about getting the best out of their people? Two recent examples of the way in which people's performance is managed, suggest that the answer might be "a lot" and "not much".In the first case, it's been reported that auto maker GM, the recipient of large government handouts, is...

Wink wink... nudge nudge... say no more... Do you recognise some of these sayings?  Perhaps you've used one or more recently - as recently as the last five minutes! That's music to my ears. She ran like the wind. I'm heartbroken. It's raining cats and dogs. He's bouncing off the walls. A heated debate. Chill out! Cool! You light up my life...

A colleague recently lamented to me "I was so annoyed that the XYZ coffee shop in the ABC Centre took sooooo long to give me a second coffee one morning, even though I was close to the machine and kept looking expectantly, I decided to ‘punish' them by going elsewhere for a year.

At an average of three coffees a day @ $3.20 each = $9.60 a...

© Hardwired Humans



Headlines fit the instinctive way we process information. Humans are hardwired to make sense of information through a process of classification. We quickly classify ideas, people and situations into categories such as "good" versus "bad", "like" versus "dislike", "us" versus "them".

There are two key dimensions to the...

To any savvy business manager, that may seem a simple or even silly question.  "Of course I know who my customers are, I wouldn't be in business otherwise" might be the natural response.  However, one organisation who recently got this drastically (and what could have been tragically) wrong, and which almost crippled an entire country (well at...

Not all business-speak is jargon - some of it can even be useful. The trouble is, there's so much nonsense spoken in workplaces these days that it's easy for valuable concepts to be tarred with the "office-speak" brush.Recently the BBC ran a story on the "business phrases we love to hate".  It was not intended to be a survey.  However, email...