When it comes to business supplies & customer service, there are plenty of companies that talk a good game… But Paul, Daniel and the team at My Total Office Solutions make it happen. Over recent months I’ve placed numerous orders, and each was received by a friendly member of their team and processed immediately. Goods

What I’m about to discuss with you is very scary… A few years back we got a loan from Zopa for home improvements, and we’ve been saving hard to pay it off early to save on interest charges. At the weekend we finally had enough to settle it. But they were closed, so we communicated

Business leadership teams (even today) can learn so much from 17th century Pirates… As Peter Leeson details in his University of Chicago article (The Law and Economics of Pirate Organisation), the economic situation pirate ships confronted crucially shaped their organisation. Pringle (historian) described a pirate ship like a “sea-going stock company”. As a result, they

It can take years of searching before finally realising your vision … Don’t get despondent in tough times. Be brave, persevere and keep going, like Siddhartha Gautama. ‘Who’s he?’ Siddhartha Gautama was born in the 6th century (B.C.) in Lumbini (now present-day Nepal) and belonged to a large clan called the Shakyas. One day a

Pablo Picasso was sat sketching in Paris by the Seine… A lady stopped and asked. “Would you sketch me please?” Picasso replied. “Sure, take a seat.” Within minutes Picasso had produced a beautiful portrait, a masterpiece! The lady said smiling. “Thank you, that’s wonderful. How much do I owe you?” Picasso smiled back saying. “5,000

Well, did you see it? ‘The Invisible Gorilla’ was written by Christopher Chabris & Daniel Simons on the back of their many studies, research, and experiments. The most famous being a video of people passing a basketball, and you’re asked to count the passes. It doesn’t really matter if you’re right or wrong either. Once

Recently, whilst leafleting business home workers through letterboxes… I met Jim, a retired guy in his 80’s. Jim said. “I used to have a business in food distribution.” Me. “What exactly does that mean Jim.” Jim replied with a 😊 “I was a milkman for 50 years.” If I ever retire and someone asks “what

You put your left arm in. Your left arm out. In, out, in, out. You shake it all about… You do the Hokey Cokey. And you turn around. That’s what it’s all about! That’s what the working from home messages feel like. Work from home. Work from home if you can. Go back to the

Yes. It’s time to break out the coping strategies again… It feels like we’re pinned in a continuous revolving door. Or wedged in a washing machine stuck on spin. Or even riding a never ending helter skelter. Turns out (as well as being a fairground ride & a kick ass Beatles song) helter skelter means

Inattentional blindness happens when you fail to see an unexpected thing in plain sight… And purely because of a lack of attention rather than any vision defects. You might be concentrating so hard on other things in the frame or you just weren’t expecting to see anything different, that you fail to see some other

Have you heard of the Mozart effect? Well in 1993 a 1-page article on the subject by Frances Rauscher, Gordon Shaw and Katherine KY was published in top scientific journal Nature. It was headlined ‘Music and Spatial Task Performance’. Shaw (a physics professor) developed a mathematical theory of how neurons in the brain work together and noticed similarities

All hail ‘The Rise of Superman’…. No. Not that Superman! I mean the electrifying book written by Steven Kotler, detailing how people use ‘flow’ to make, what seems the impossible possible, and becoming kinda superhuman in the process. Flow is a state of mind where you’re so focused on achieving one task, everything else disappears

The role of great leadership (once you’ve built a great team) is to remove any obstacles (including yourself) that get in the way… You’ve no doubt heard the classic and brilliant Steve Job’s quote: ‘It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us