Team Guru Podcast

I love to day dream about all the magnificent changes to technology that are and will affect our lives. Concepts like autonomous cars, personal assistants and any of the myriad things that will become normal within our life time. I marvel at the fact that in all likelihood, my kids will probably never drive a car and humans could be banned from driving on our roads completely. I love to ponder the social and political implication of it all. Therefore, I never pass up an opportunity to chat with someone who actually knows what they’re talking about. Michael McQueen is an award-winning speaker, business strategist and trend forc aster. He recently allowed me to fire all of questions at him about the future and what we can expect. It’s a wide ranging conversation we get technical, social and even a little political.

Do you create time and space for new ideas? Or are you crushing your ability to be creative? I’ve spoken many times on this podcast about the three evils of the workplace. An inbox overflowing with emails, day after day of back to back meetings and stilted, awkward and ineffective conversations with colleagues. The three evils of the workplace have a profound impact on the time we spend at work.

I’m proud to once again offer a new episode of the podcast in conjunction with Woman in Mining and Resources Queensland. WIMARQ is a group that works to support and promote women across all areas of the primary resources industry. Back in in episode 76 I spoke with Tim Crossley, the former COO of BHP. In episode 57 I spoke with Jenny Purdie a longtime WIMARQ member who is currently the CEO of Adani’s renewables operation in Australia. In this episode I speak with the 2018 winner of WIMARQ’s Exceptional Women in Mining Award, Jo-Anne Dudley. Jo-Anne has been working in the mining sector for 25 years. She has worked in FIFO roles, spent years of her life underground, been the only women working on site and survived not one but 2 near fatal workplace accidents. It has been a colourful and energetic career.

Promises are important - we all know that. But it’s the promises we make to ourselves that are the most important of all. When we break those promises we are really good at dreaming up excuses to go with them - and worse still, we play all sorts of mind tricks to convince ourselves that they’re real. I want to share with you a very blunt truth about the world. Excuses are for losers.

Is your team working well? You know the answer immediately. But figuring out why some groups of people work well together while others don’t can be a mysterious thing. My guest is week is team expert, author and speaker Dermot Crowley. At the heart of his work is a really powerful concept. Teams are either in a state of Friction or flow.

So you want your online business to be a success ? Of course you do. Why else would you be doing it? In this, episode I’ll be chatting with Bernadette Schwerdt, one of Australia’s leading speakers and writers on the topic of .com success.

They call themselves “Seasteaders” and this month their dream took another big leap towards reality. The plan is to build a floating nation near French Polynesia. Expected to be completed by 2022 the island will include 300 homes along with hotels, restaurants and offices and more. The total cost is $50 million and it’s being bankrolled by PayPal founder Peter Thiel. The Floating Island Project is being guided by The Seasteading Institute. I spoke with the President of the Seasteading Institute, Joe Quirk

How healthy are the relationships at your office? The stats on this are scary, ugly and worrying. We are so bad at developing relationships at work despite being the place we spend almost a third of our life. That’s it’s hurting productivity and it’s hurting the bottom line. But worst of all it’s hurting us. Especially our mental health. It’s a terrible state of affairs. We are so bad at developing healthy workplace relationships that it is making us disengaged and bad at our jobs.

A new war has broken out in countries all around the world. In years past divisions based on class and religion tore societies apart. But this new factionalism is based on something we've rarely seen before. We are at war over the year of your birth. Inter-generational anger is growing across the developed world. A recent poll of Americans found that 51% of millennials blame the baby boomers for ruining their lives.

Have you ever spent time thinking about your personal brand? The concept of a personal brand might sound a bit superficial. At first blush it trivializes character in favour of an image. I shared many of those views for many years. So, this week, I invited Debbie O’Connor to convince me otherwise. And I have to say she did an excellent job. Debbie is a ….. In this conversation Debbie shares with us the importance of personal brand. And she makes the case that a personal brand runs much deeper than simple image management. She also gives away her secrets including the five steps to better understand their personal brand. Follow along, ask yourself these questions, and see if you are convinced.

We’ve all been to one of those feel good business culture days. They can actually be quite enjoyable. You get to know your colleagues in a new way. You have the opportunity to learn some new stuff and put a few concerns on the table. They can feel great. But the next day, you're hit an overflowing inbox and a day of back to back meetings. Before you know, that great cultural day is but a blurred memory. My guest is here to make sure you, your team and your organisation doesn’t become another statistic.

Ask most people how they are – especially at work – and they will invariably answer that they’re busy. So busy. But that’s good, right? Wrong. It’s not good, and we know it. The habit our society has developed, the obsession with being busy – or at least appearing to be busy – is doing us untold damage. To us, the quality of our work, our teams and our families.

If you could guarantee just one trait for your child what would it be? Kindness? Intelligence? Enthusiasm? Those are all good choices but my guest this week says the most important human gift is curiosity. It's the key to creativity, innovation and personal growth. Evette Cordy is the author of Cultivating Curiosity: How to Unearth Your Most Valuable Problem to Inspire Growth. A healthy dose of curiosity allows us to be both problem solvers and problem finders. The ability to ask the right questions and devise clever solutions are products of the curious mind.

Delete Facebook. You've been thinking about it for a while now. And you're not alone. But that private thought became a full blown civic movement this month. The Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed the extent to which our personal information has been sold by Facebook to a variety of unscrupulous third parties. Angela Lockwood joins me to talk about how people can learn to disconnect. Angela is the author of the book Switch Off : How to find calm in a noisy world. She told me that most people think that it's nearly impossible to reduce their use of social media.

Recently I was invited to host an event sponsored by Women in Resource Mining Queensland. I interviewed Tim Crossley who has had a long career with some of the biggest companies in Australia, including BHP Billiton. We discussed how he made the transition from technical doer to technical leader through the various levels of senior management. We discussed his strengths and weaknesses in the C-suite. And Tim was very open and honest about the price he paid in his personal life to achieve his professional goals.

There's been a relentless stream of news coverage over the last few years about how the robots are about to change everything. We are headed into uncharted waters when it comes to artificial intelligence and automation. But there is a tremendous upside to living in a world freed from subsistence labour. Human creativity will be the last thing to be replaced by robots. Those that are prepared for that change will be the first to succeed.

Capitalism is on the brink of significant change and a new new horizon coming into view. That's the view of Mike Edmonds who joins me this week to discuss this powerful concept. Mike is the chairman of Meerkats, an advertising company based in Perth. As a veteran of the marketing world he’s seen capitalism up close. He says change is coming and it is now possible to see what the new economy will look like. In his new book Truth. Growth. Repeat. Mike details how a company based on authenticity and honesty is the best way to ensure long term profitability.

Welcome to the first of a new format we're test driving here on the Team Guru Podcast. For the last couple of years I've been posting a new episode every two weeks. Starting today I'm going to release a minisode on the alternate weeks – bringing our total releases up to four per month. I've been lucky enough to amass over 70 hours of interviews since 2015. There are a lot of great lessons in there. In each of these minisodes I want to pluck out one of those lessons that will have a particular resonance with the issues of the day. Today it's all about great coaching.

Its February and that means many of you have already failed to live up to your New Year's resolutions. Don't worry you're not alone. Statistics show that 40% of people will have failed to maintain our resolutions after four weeks. By six months that number rises to 60%. Maybe you wanted to lose weight or spend more time with family or just to put the damn phone down. Let's be honest resolutions are hard! Setting goals and trying achieving more in our personal and work lives is laudable. But without the right structure in place you're bound to fail. I've discussed how to create that structure many times on the Team Guru Podcast. Today, I want to share some of the best lessons I've learned over the last two years.

You're about to hear a very timely conversation. In the last episode we spoke with Kerry Boulton about the importance of creating a sales mindset. Thinking big enough to develop our business in a way so that it has some value on the open market. My guest in this episode is Stephen Barnes who is an expert in turning around businesses. He's all about changing the corporate culture from labour-intensive stress factories into high-performing value machines. At this time of year when we are all full of enthusiasm for the opportunities ahead Stephen tells us the top five things we must have to ensure a flourishing company.