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

The Atlantic Daily has published a piece called It’s Okay to Like Barry Manilow. Well, phew! I wasn’t aware it was verboten, but thanks for that. Good to know we can have different opinions, but a recent article in HR Online by Caroline Riches, was more disturbing than the fact that I now can’t get

I’ve had a long day of spuddling. I was very busy, but I achieved nothing. I spuddled. I’m sure we have all had days like this, where we’ve exhausted ourselves without moving any meaningful objective along an inch. There are organisations where the ability to spuddle is probably highly valued, but I find it dispiriting.

Earlier in my working life, I often caught the train from Euston station in London, to Northampton. Every now and then, an older passenger would lean over to tell me (as we went through Bletchley) that ‘a lot of things went on there during the war, you know.’  This was always said in a hushed,

My Facebook feed is sending me clips of Dame Edna, and in the middle of the night, I find myself laughing until I cry. I adored Barry Humphries. He had a gift for hearing the vernacular and turning it back on the audience with razor sharp wit. But Barry Humphries was not just Dame Edna