It was an irresistible headline; Man skipped work for 5 years and no one noticed until he won an award. I spotted it in 2016 and had to hit print. This true story occurred in the Spanish public sector, which probably comes as no surprise to many. But far less funny, was the recent story […]

Robert Louis Stevenson wrote that sooner or later, everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences. I recalled this quote when I read about Alan Joyce this week. Qantas has cut his final and expected payout by $9.3 million. This was in response to a McKinsey review, which found that Joyce’s 15-year tenure in Qantas

It was hard to have any sort of career in the 80s or 90s that did not involve working through a merger, acquisition or even the complete dissolution of an employer. A good friend has been doing some reflecting (in his retirement), and with his permission, I am sharing his thoughts on a time that

Stoicism is back, as if it was a fashion, like flares or ice blue eye shadow.  It is probably not surprising given the laws of motion, that for every action in nature, there is an equal and opposite reaction. What is stoicism equally opposing? One suggestion might be the rise of the catastrophist and a

At National Australia Bank’s last AGM, CEO Ross McEwan, responded to concerns about ongoing bank closures.  It’s never easy, he said, in an unconvincing, saddened tone, almost persuading me that this was regretted at the highest levels. However, NAB closed 67 branches in the year leading up to that meeting, so it’s clear that in

Obituary writing is a strange profession. Hugh Massingberd (from the UK’s Telegraph) introduced humour and style into a traditionally dry area of newspaper journalism and believed that his normally conservative paper should celebrate the lives of people who were interesting as well those who were eminent. His obituary collection, Thinker, Failure, Soldier, Jailer contains so

I was in a nice restaurant recently when a man was seated nearby and continued to wear a baseball cap. Didn’t his parents teach him that you never wear a hat at the table? someone asked. Of course, this prompted a familiar conversation called, Don’t People Know This These Days? And then we got stuck

A recent tribute in the Financial Review, What Charlie Munger Taught Me About Life, by Jonathan Shapiro, has made me think about mentoring and having positive role models. Charlie Munger was famous for being Warren Buffet’s sidekick. He passed in 2023, just before his 100th birthday with a net worth estimated at $2.7 billion. It

Any Australian who worked overseas, realised that some of the words we once bandied about in our offices, such as bludger, smoko, yakka, sickie, wowser, and whinger, required a translation. This was also true for phrases such as ‘running around like a blue arsed fly’ or ‘you’ve got Buckley’s,’ as in, you’ve got no chance.

Retirement experts talk about three phases; GO-GO, SLOW-GO and NO-GO. If that applied to buying a campervan, for example, then GO-GO would be setting off for a year on the road, SLOW-GO would be taking the campervan out occasionally, and NO-GO would be forgetting that it’s rusting at the back of the garden. In his