Ricardo Semler Timeline 1959 Born. 1975 Takes summer job in father’s company. 1980 Takes over Semler and Co; fires 60% of top management. 1983 Starts out on acquisition trail. 1984 Forced by illness to reassess working methods. 1993 Publishes Maverick. 1998 Achieves 500% increase in profits. Summary Ricardo Semler is the man behind a magnificent [...]

Getting Started It could be argued that adults are displaying more and more traditionally ‘childlike’ tendencies; in today’s entertainment-on-demand culture, we are becoming increasingly fickle and our attention spans are becoming shorter. We seem to be losing the more mature ability to delay gratification. But is this really a bad thing, or merely a sign [...]

Getting Started Our thinking styles develop over the years and become habitual. Very often people make statements like ‘I’m not creative’, or ‘I’m not really a thinker’. All this means is that they haven’t been introduced to, or adopted, different ways of using their minds. Human beings underutilise their brains. Estimates are that only 10% [...]

Getting Started Pressure is increasingly a way of life for managers and executives. The constant drive for performance improvements and increased efficiency heightens pressure on individuals, and even more so on managers. Learning to identify different types of pressure and finding ways to cope with them have become increasingly important. FAQs My boss thrives on [...]

Introduction Paul Hawken is an environmentalist, entrepreneur, and best-selling author, widely respected for his ideas on how corporations can achieve sustainable, ecologically-sound development. His latest book, written with Amory and Hunter Lovins, is Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution. In it, Paul Hawken highlights the costs and consequences of 200 hundred years of industrial [...]

Developing Facilitation Skills Getting Started The art of facilitation enables a group of people (as few as two) to reach an outcome for which they will take responsibility and to which they will be fully committed. The facilitator acts as a catalyst, creating the conditions for productive behavioural chemistry to take place. Good facilitation skills [...]

Developing an Effective Learning Style Getting Started In today’s increasingly competitive business world, it is more difficult for organisations to differentiate themselves from one another based solely on product features, or even price. More and more, companies are succeeding or failing on the basis of speed: how quickly people in the organisation can learn and [...]

Do you have the skills to be your own boss? Getting Started There are many different reasons why you might think about leaving full-time employment and becoming your own boss. You could have had enough of a formal, corporate environment, for example, or want to run your own business. Whatever your motivation, you’ll need to [...]