Polishing the heart
The former US Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, gained fame, or perhaps infamy, from a 2002 news briefing from the podium at the Department of Defense. He said to the assembled Press Pack: “Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things […]
Back to the rough ground
In the business world we so often talk about the need to be frictionless in the sense that our clients and stakeholders can interact with us and navigate our services or products with the minimum of disturbance and effort. A worthy goal surely. Any of us who have tried to procure services from some organisations […]
Digital health – a driver for health equality
Digital health, which encompasses the full spectrum of the use of digital technologies to improve health outcomes, has the potential to revolutionise healthcare, perhaps especially so in developing countries. These regions often face acute challenges in healthcare delivery, including limited access to medical facilities, a shortage of healthcare professionals, and inadequate infrastructure. By leveraging digital […]
Elegy for Ellie
I sat with Ellie as she gently slipped into a deep sleep today. In fact, I had slept with her, worked with her, and cried with her for much of the last week. ‘Slipped’; ‘fell asleep’; ‘passed away’. So many euphemisms to avoid the difficulty, the permanency. What I mean is that Ellie died. For […]
Colourless green ideas sleep furiously
The somewhat bizarre title of this post is a quote from the influential linguistics professor, Noam Chomsky, in his 1957 book “Syntactic Structures”. In the book, he presented this sentence as an example of a grammatically well-formed but semantically nonsensical sentence. He used it to illustrate the distinction between syntax and semantics, two key components […]
Anxiety – a leadership birth pang?
I’ve been reflecting a lot recently on anxiety – its antecedents, its presentation, its impacts. It is perhaps not surprising. I don’t feel particularly anxious – at least not at a conscious level. But it is ‘in the air’. Be it the insidious impacts of a struggling economy, the sense of impending doom from escalating […]
Shared experience
I made a new friend yesterday on a plane. We bonded over a shared experience when our business class airline seats failed to turn into beds on our flight back from Rwanda – a very first-world problem, I acknowledge. We were complete strangers in Kigali – 4,000 miles later in London we had found common […]
Seneca’s lament
My last post was written in the magical city of Rome, that wonderful nexus of the old and the new, bustling with noisy life yet infused with the calm perspective of ages past. That city above all, confronts me with the dialectical worldviews of old and new, the paradoxical emphases of the ages, the cultural […]
When in Rome …
I’m very fortunate to be writing this in Italy in the beautiful and ancient city of Rome. Anyone who has ever had the joyful opportunity to visit this place will comment on its inspiring atmosphere, it’s ability to link the old with the new, to transcend the centuries. Being here at Easter makes this all […]
I don’t have the capacity …
How often do I find myself using that phrase – “I don’t have the capacity”? To be honest, I normally only use it to myself, in response to external requests for attention and in the context of meaning I’m overstretched, I don’t have the time, my bandwidth is maxed out. I don’t often enough use […]
