Category Archives: People Development

Theory Of Constraints, Or Principle Of Design?

The Theory of Constraints is something that caught my eye recently. I was indulging myself in a STRATFOR video in which George Friedman was postulating that due to the unchangeables of geography, historical baggage, human behaviour and time in history, peoples and nations may aspire to things lofty and noble, and not arrive at where […]

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Mindsets Of Magnificence

As Week Six of 2014 opens, take a little time to reflect upon the mindsets that characterize you. What is your default mindset? Are you happy with it? Are there things which you’d like changed? Do you need to grow in certain aspects? Here are a few Magnificent Mindsets which I trust will be something you […]

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Lego Block Leadership.

Lego? Why not? Your equipment happens to be blocks of different sizes, shapes and colours. Using just a few different types of building blocks, you could construct almost anything you fancy. This is mind-boggling when you remember that Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) controls everything about how we are made, and is made up of chains of […]

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A Comment On McKinsey’s “Government by design: Four principles for a better public sector.”

Douglas O’Loughlin shared this on Facebook, and I thought I’d pen some of my thoughts about this, since effective, practical leadership development is central to the topic. The McKinsey article may be found here: http://bit.ly/JqlnGE The article lists four principles for a better public sector: Better evidence for decision making. Greater engagement and empowerment of citizens. […]

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Charades Of Conflict.

We have all, I suppose, heard of “constructive conflict”. Do you think it exists? When was the last time you had some “constructive conflict”? Did you feel as though you were in conflict with others? It has been said that when you have more than one person in an organization, disagreements are inevitable. Therefore, the […]

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Space-Eye View, Feet On Ground

I’ve just completed a day and a half facilitating a teambuilding session under the auspices of my allies Fish Camp Learning Sdn Bhd. Participants were put through their paces with both challenging outdoor and indoor activities, including sea rafting, and had the opportunity to know each other much better. They were very cohesive and definitely […]

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The Fairest Of Them All? Aren’t They All?

Download the pdf. Hi, I’m Elijah Lim. Mirror, mirror, on the wall…who’s the best assessment of them all? Now, you will realize that there are many psychometric tools, there are many leadership assessments, personality tests, team assessments, you name it. Love them or hate them, one thing’s for certain – they’re here to stay, they’ve […]

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The Fallacy Of Legislating Hiring Practices

In Singapore, a few companies have made the news because they posted job ads worded in such a manner as to imply a preference for foreign workers over Singaporeans. This violated some legislation which stipulated that companies ought to have a certain percentage of Singaporeans already in their headcount before they could proceed to hire […]

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Delegate. Do. Deliberately.

Download the pdf. This is not a word-for-word transcript, but the essence is the same. I came across a LinkedIn article called “Key Reasons Delegating Is SO Difficult and What To Do About It” on 07 Oct 2013. I’d written something about “Deliberate delegation” before, and this post caught my eye. It seems that the […]

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The Perils Of Positive Thinking.

I came across an article on Harvard Business Review today called “Less-Confident People Are More Successful.” I wonder if there was any misunderstanding about what “confident” really means. Looking up the etymology dictionary, we see that “confident” is from: If the writer, Dr Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, intended for “confident” to lean more toward the side of smugness and […]

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Deliberate Delegation. Reprint Of Newsletter Issue 62 – 18 Sep 2012

I keep seeing posts and discussions on delegation, so I thought I’d better post this again, so that people can keep this thing called “delegation” in its proper perspective. Is the word “delegation” a dreaded word at your workplace? If you are a leader, do you know who, what, where, when and why to delegate? […]

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Generational Generalities. How Germane. How Not.

Baby Boomers. Gen X. Gen Y. Gen Z. Gen Gap. Gen Repeat Process. Gen ad infinitum. We really love labelling, stereotyping and generalizing, don’t we? Just because some “expert” said that “studies have shown that…”, means we pick up the paint roller and give all and sundry the broad-brush treatment. Does that happen to you? […]

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