Both my mother and I were born in South Australia.

She was the third daughter of Ernest and Dorothy Walsh; her father was a Baptist Minister. Mum was many things: a wife, writer, harp player, auntie, poet, gardener, homemaker, teacher, seamstress, cook, historian, bodyboarder, grandmother, social justice champion, church volunteer, Rotarian, knitter, author, playwright, animal lover, community leader and public speaker.

In her life, Mum fought for nuclear disarmament, the environment and refugee children in detention. She had a brilliant bullshit meter and was deeply saddened by recent life events - like the uncovering of the child sexual abuse sickness that plagued the Church. Mum was horrified by the political rise of so-called leaders, like the hopelessly 'self-serving Morrison' and the dispassionate and 'always uninspiring' Dutton.

Mum's journey through this world was guided by eulogy virtues, not resume virtues, which these days are a rare thing. I never saw my Mum's resume bec...

Be a better captain of your ship.

Tip the scales on your ship from 'what just happened' to 'we make things happen.’

The Strategy Book will help you be like ‘Jack Sparrow on Steroids.’

In today's ever-changing business oceans, the word 'strategy' may have lost some appeal. But with constant storms and increasing digital connectivity, a well-crafted strategy is more critical than ever.

Don't let past painful strategy adventures deter you. The key to success in navigating the waves lies in cultivating a Strategic Mindset.

Education through action is the key to learning! The Strategy Book provides dozens of seaworthy illustrations, insights, activities and ideas to help you excel in business.

Buy your copy of The Strategy Book here (with free shipping ;-) www.halecg.com/store

#thestrategybook

#thestrategyguy

#strategicmindset

Running a company is not always a sprint, often it's like running a marathon. In preparing for a successful marathon, I've learned to mix up my training. Sometimes I need to train longer distances. This morning I ran a 21 km piece in preparation for my upcoming Marathon in June.

Other times I need to do sprint training on the track.

The same goes for being an efficient and effective CEO.

My friend Rowan, a retired CEO and veteran of the telco industry, shares the three primary functions that guided him as a CEO for twenty years: gaining employee buy-in, having a clear vision, and ensuring alignment between all parts of the business. This is typically a slow process and takes time. Here slow and steady wins the race.

Yet for a new CEO, it's important to very quickly cultivate self-awareness and embrace your shadow. Ego management and self-care are critical. You must be fast here. Expanding your awareness helps you prepare for and adapt in the face of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and...

Looking back at history, we can see examples of businesses that failed to create options and make smart bets, leading to their downfall. Do you remember Encyclopaedia Britannica, Kodak and Blockbuster? 

Encyclopaedia Britannica, Kodak and Blockbuster failed to adapt to changing market conditions and were eventually overtaken by competitors who did.

In the past, movie rentals required customers to physically visit a store and then rewind the tape before returning it. The rise of digital streaming services like Netflix has made this process obsolete, rendering traditional movie rental stores like Blockbuster irrelevant. 

Similarly, the advent of digital photography rendered Kodak's film-based business model obsolete.

And although Encyclopaedia Britannica was the only way to accidentally learn about the mating habits of sloths, it failed to embrace the internet successfully. 

In the constantly evolving landscape of the business world, leaders need to develop a strategic mindset and c...

I love presenting to community leaders across the regions. They are frequently beautiful living examples of courage, resilience, hospitality and kindness.

This month was no exception. Petra Van Beek invited me to speak to 70 business leaders in Gympie. Gympie's Leaders were such an enthusiastic audience. As a speaker, walking into a room full of people who already feel safe with each other and are ready to learn and have fun makes my job super easy.

A few days later, I received a kind testimonial from Petra:

'Our community leaders appreciated John Hale’s Strategic Mindset Presentation. John gave our members a series of simple yet powerful ways to grow and scale their businesses in new ways. We all learnt the absolute importance of making strategic choices to future-proof our businesses.

I recommend John as a highly professional speaker who provides a great mixture of entertaining stories, empowering ideas and thoughtful audience engagement and interaction.'

To succeed with any str...

This month I will commence writing my next book, 'The Strategic CEO', for CEOs or those on the path to becoming one. To succeed, CEOs need to embrace several paradoxes, which I will unpack in the book.

Strategic CEOs are north star leaders who embody twelve extraordinary habits.

Strategic CEOs actively steer their organisations. Strategic CEOs don't get stuck in a Boardroom or behind a desk. They repeatedly engage with the business, its employees, customers, suppliers and shareholders. For CEOs, their time, not money, is the scarcest resource they have to ensure their firm grows profitably. 

Demands on CEOs come from many quarters. If a CEO falls behind, they are forced to shift from being proactive to being reactive. Proactivity creates a virtuous cycle with many opportunities. Reactivity can create a vicious cycle, with increasingly riskier fires for a CEO to put out.

To mitigate the risks of tripping up, lagging behind or falling into a reactive spiral, CEOs need to think and ac...

The positive market response to Apple's new Silicon computers highlights the power of parallel processing. Apple achieved this with a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) design. RISC microprocessors are not new. In the late 1980s, as a Systems Engineer at Hewlett Packard, I compiled and executed code on a quarter-of-a-million-dollar Unix workstation that housed the world's first and fastest parallel reduced instruction set microprocessor (PRISM). Apple's M1 microprocessor is 10,000x faster than the first PRISM microprocessor and sells for just eight hundred dollars!

RISC computing breaks down complex software instructions into smaller parts that run in parallel on microprocessor arrays so that software programs compile and execute much faster. While computers can handle multiple tasks simultaneously, by comparison, humans are poor at multitasking.

The pandemic highlighted human multitasking limitations to me. Once CEOs became distracted with managing the moment-to-moment issues o...

Global leadership is in crisis.

It is difficult to find examples of good strategic leadership anywhere.

From a laundry list including Boris Johnson, Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu, Vladimir Putin, and Xi Jinping, one might mistake incompetence, bribery, corruption, embezzlement, ethnic cleansing and genocide as valid strategies for top leaders.

Oligarchic business leaders like Amazon's Bezos and Facebook's Zuckerberg, simply offer unpalatable examples. Despite his immense wealth, Bezos lacks the philanthropic generosity shared by many who give generously despite having very little. Zuckerberg has us addicted to two and a half hours of social media per day and repeatedly violates our trust and privacy in his pursuit of profit.

Young Swedish environmental activist, Greta Thunberg's 2019 address to the United Nations could well have been addressed to business leaders:

"You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I'm one of the lucky ones. People are su...