I'm a believer in education, I really am, and my children's eduction is very important to me. I've pursued high-level tertiary education myself, and I regularly attend business and personal development courses. But I'm also a believer in determination, passion and experience. A huge believer in fact, and sitting next to a guy in the Wool business one evening  after speaking at an Icehouse event, I was reminded of why... His story went something like this: He was sacked from his first job packing shelves at K-Mart when he was young. I believe he left school early as he suffered with dyslexia and To View More >>

Yesterday I let you know that I was going to take the "31 Days To A Better Blog" challenge and I am getting more and more excited. Day 1 The task for today was to write an "elevator pitch for my blog". This was something that had been on my mind for a while, as I felt I didn't have a strong focus around what I wrote. I genuinely think I could go "toe to toe" and hold my own in a discussion on most of the issues I write about, but I wasn't providing any depth of information. We have deep experience and knowledge in HR, IT, Marketing, Relationships, Leadership, Strategy etc but I didn't want to To View More >>

Imagine if there was something that, if you did it consistently, would improve all relationships completely. Wouldn't that be amazing? I don't want to overstate it, but I think the concept of the "Umbrella of Rapport", might just be that powerful, so please enjoy. Today I came across some notes from an internal presentation that I did for our sales people last year on how they might improve their relationships, in this case with our clients. Part of it included this powerful idea. I don't take credit for it, I first heard it from Tony Robbins, but I have added my own thoughts below. In my opinion To View More >>

Over the last 6 months or so I've been to France, UK (twice), Australia (3 times), Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, USA (3 times), and if you are based in New Zealand like me that's a lot of flying. For a lot of people that sounds glamorous, and on occasion it can be, but seriously, the inside of a hotel room in Paris isn't much different from one in Las Vegas and if you don't get out of it you could be anywhere. I've just got back from a course in San Antonio (Texas) and by the time I left I felt like a caged rat. In 8 days I only got outside my hotel 4 times, and that was to cross the road To View More >>

I received this tweet a couple of days ago in responce to a tweet I wrote about Geek Bait. I must say it made my heart race momentarilly ... Was I being a Dork, I like being a Geek but am I a Nerd? OMG Who am I? So lets start by saying I am a Geek ... no question about that, but I don't think I am a nerd. Since then it's been the topic of some office discussion ... I work in an office surrounded by software developers so there have been a few varying thoughts on the topic. Anyway, as any good Geek would do I went to Google ... Ok that's not true, I went to WolframAlpha but when their definition To View More >>