A big deal or just business as usual? Over the last 40 odd years I’ve gained lots of experience of running local and remote teams, often by finding out by what didn’t work first, then learning how to fix it. One of my best discoveries, and yes I learned this the hard way, was that […]
What Will My Successor be doing on Thursdays and Fridays?
A Lighthearted but potentially serious question This post is based on an editorial piece I wrote for the Q4 2019 Institute of Water Journal which was focused on leadership and management Would you like your managers to be looking for work to do, rather than struggling to meet objectives? And having time to develop their […]
Ransomware? No problem
A cheap and effective way of beating the ransomware bandits let’s look at this from the other end first. Imagine you run a small business , like I do. The phone rings. It one of your people telling you that they can’t access any billing or client order information because all your files have been […]
Mining Rough Diamonds
Or why the best candidate may not be the obvious one This post is based on an article I wrote for the spring 2019 edition of the Institute of Water’s magazine The problem What do you do with a team member best described as a rough diamond, technically brilliant but a challenge to work with? […]
Another small act of kindness
in August 2017 I wrote about three small acts of kindness that I had experienced. In each the giver did not do have to do what they did, but did so anyway, and in each case I had a better day as a results. Nice…. In this case the small act of kindness was by […]
Building a team of many talents
In the summer of 2017 I was offered a three month contract as Interim Water Quality Monitoring Manager with Southern Water to help implement a new Compliance and Resilience directorate. Writes Bob Windmill Eight months later (yeah, I know) I had led the creation of an entirely new team of six monitoring scientists and a […]
Three things I value: Part 2 – Worth paying a bit more for
In this post you will read about a device that costs low hundreds of pounds which only does he same basic job as a something costing about a third of that, but one which I still wouldn’t want to be without. Writes Bob Windmill So, what is this device, and what makes it worth the […]
Three things I value: Part 1 – the cheap but effective
Reading the post you will see why I value a device that cost less than thirty pounds, that at various points caused me to pull my hair out, but yet I wouldn’t want to be without. Writes Bob Windmill So what’s the cheap but effective example, then?
Three things I value – How it came about
I firmly subscribe to the idea that people and relationships are more important than material possessions, yet in a recent discussion I found myself defending the idea of possessions being important. writes Bob Windmill Subscribe or buy? The context was a discussion with a group of friends on millennials increasingly buying rather than possessions, and […]
Solving the right problem
And not the one you thought it was… Have you ever wrestled with a problem, spending hours and days getting nowhere? Where what ever solution you come up with just wouldn’t work? This post is about a recent example of my own making. Happily the consequences were not serious but it was a sharp reminder […]