In this episode, Paul Diamond and I share our experiences in jumping from a corporate career into entrepreneurship. Like myself, people who do this often read many motivational books and write a business plan before they jump.  Without a doubt the biggest mistake that I made was not identifying a big social mission and therefore omitting in the business plan the tasks needed to act on the mission in addition to delivering a product and service. Not surprisingly I pivoted several times which is another way of saying I had to overcome multiple failures.  The goal of this episode is for ..read more

When I left the corporate life and entered the entrepreneurial world I discovered one asset to be invaluable (besides the black book discussed in the previous episode with Warwick Hill). That asset is the ability to create value from scratch. My guest Elena Branet, a marketing leader at Vodafone, attributes her successful career to that ability. In her spare time Elena created from scratch the Digital Camp stemming from a desire for her teenage children to develop skills useful for the growing sustainability ecosystem. At the camp, students participate in workshops and create projects under th ..read more

I met Warwick Hill in 2016 when he was the CEO of Microsoft for Startups and the company that I worked for at the time was a resident. Warwick is a hard core serial entrepreneur who started his first business in his early 20s and has since built and sold a number of companies of increasing complexity which included the effective use of Indian and Chinese resources.   Many startups focus all of their efforts in delivering product/market fit of a single new technology before scaling. By contrast Warwick is delivering social change in sustainable energy by pooling a diversity of technologies ..read more

A while back I read a blog by Seth Godin called The point of maximum leverage and found this assertion arresting: "For a job search, fixing your resume isn’t nearly as important as shipping a personal project." I totally agree and from my own experience, carefully presenting some kind of relevant personal project can shift the job interview in the candidates' favour. In this conversation, Paul Diamond and I explore the constituents of a personal project which often involves technology such as podcasting, vlogging, or website creation but can be anything. We examine the value of personal projec ..read more

Jo Spolton's startup, Rumage helps users search second hand items from multiple sites. What distinguishes Rumage from other aggregator sites is it's circular economy model and a compelling mission that engages its stakeholders and customers. The current success of Rumage is attributed in no small measure to Jo's pursuit of complex challenges that engage her creatively, physically and mentally to the point of generating a persistent feeling of flow. To this end, she started out as an artist building statues from scrap cars but decided to park her artistic pursuits to race around the world in a ..read more

This is the forth part of the series on the Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on careers. In the previous 3 episodes my guest Paul Diamond and I tried to rationalise the various aspects of career development that have been disrupted by the pandemic. During those conversations, I sometimes brought up my personal experience with politically toxic working environments which prompted my desire for trust and an ethical framework in my professional projects going forward. The following conversation with Paul explores this further. We discuss how leadership from the top can make or break political toxi ..read more

This is the third part of the series on the Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on careers. In the previous episode my guest Paul Diamond and I discussed career reinvention whereby I presented my career journey from my earliest jobs to my current challenges and Paul, acting as career coach, analysed it to identify a logical progression. From this episode on career management, it is clear that each career journey is unique and is governed by different principals and goals which are best managed by the employee rather than the their employer in order to ensure continuity if the employee changes jobs ..read more

In the previous episode my guest Paul Diamond and I discussed the importance of understanding one's own relationship with their work as a prerequisite for career development. Although we spoke mostly in general terms we did introduce a couple of case studies, one of which was my own. For this episode on career reinvention we expand on my case study whereby I presented my entire career journey from my earliest jobs to my current challenges and Paul assumed his professional role as a career management coach. It was the first time that I reflected on my career in this way. While I often felt that ..read more

On the previous episode where I interviewed Paul Diamond and Tom Lethaby about their project People on Work, we discussed the impact that the COVID pandemic was having on people's working lives. Indeed the pandemic has forced me to adapt my own working life. Because so many people find themselves in this situation, I wanted to devote the next few episodes to exploring career changes during the pandemic and Paul Diamond from the previous interview kindly agreed to help. Paul is a career coach and has written several books and has blogged on the subject. In Part 1 of this series we do a deep di ..read more

Paul Diamond and Tom Lethaby's project People on Work is a YouTube channel with over 100 brief interviews of individuals pursuing a wide diversity of careers. Each interviewee is asked the same 3 questions that essentially charts their career journey. Paul and Tom's vision is to scale People on Work to literally thousands of interviews to become a useful resource for virtually anyone starting their career or considering a career change. This is achievable based on a growth hacking model where interviewees introduce their network to the platform. Moreover Paul and Tom also envision a flywheel a ..read more