Making Business Matter (MBM)

E12 - Professor Damian Hughes: A Change Management Catalyst and Professor of Organisational Psychology and Change. Read the Interview Transcript Below: Jo Palmer: 'We are doing an expert interview, and today I'm with Damian Hughes. We are talking largely about organisation development. So rather than me introduce your credentials, Damian, I think you'd do a better job than me.' Damian Hughes: 'Wel...

You start a task and another one comes up. You do that, and another one comes up. So, you then do that. Until - you guessed it - another one comes up! You are task switching.

You've spent months preparing for that date with destiny. The presentation that will make or break your career. You know you are ready, yet somewhere deep inside there's a voice that says you're not good enough. You don't belong. In short, there's a metaphoric post-it note on your head saying, 'FAIL'. You need to learn how to build confidence and change that voice. 

Do you have a looming deadline that's still some way off? You know that if you got a jump on it and made an early start on that presentation you will undoubtedly tinker with it until the last minute, wasting more time!  Listen to our podcast to learn some useful tips to help you stop procrastinating and start learning to trust yourself. 

Emails are an essential tool. Yet, we were never really trained how to use them. Listen to our latest podcast to learn some practical email writing tips to help you improve your email effectiveness.

E7 - You Do Your Best Work Under Pressure? You’re a Tight Deadline Junkie Do you leave everything to the last minute? Do you find yourself burning the midnight oil time after and time to meet deadlines? Yet, somehow, every time you pull of a masterstroke of genius and deliver. You deliver, not just on time, but you deliver your best work. You might just be one of the many tight deadline junkies. L...

Episode 6 - Not Having Effective Meetings? Are You Wasting Valuable Time? Answer: Have More Meetings! We spend most of our working lives in them. Yet, they are rarely an effective use of our time. In short, we simply aren't making the most of them. In fact, the problem is we aren't having enough of them! Listen to this podcast to learn how to have more effective meetings. Here, we argue, that shor...

Episode 5 – The Annual Appraisal is Lost In this podcast, we discuss a simple technique to make the annual appraisal useful at work. One of the mainstays of business has always been the annual appraisal. Since time and memorial business people have struggled to use them as an effective tool for business. There is a better way. Read the Annual Appraisal Podcast Transcript: "Annual appraisals just d...

The return on time & money invested is zero. You work in the corporate world, you attend 1-day training courses. You come back and get on with your work. Nothing changes. We spend 10 years at school going to lesson after lesson. Yet, we then get out into the big wide world and expect to learn a skill between 9-5 in a training course. It simply can not happen.

Are your presentations engaging? Recent research says that audiences either go on their phones or fall asleep in presentations. We need to make our presentations much more engaging. Presenting is a key business skill and if we are not good at this skill, we will fail to engage our audience and sell, gain buy-in, or achieve our objectives.

You are doing shallow work only. Working as a knowledge worker in the corporate world can be tough. The danger is that you are busy but busy doing the shallow work. The work that doesn't make a big difference. Learn how to identify the important tasks and know how to get them done.

The email Monster is taking over. He is out of its cage. Find out how you can tame the email monster with the hare and the tortoise technique. A new tool required in this digital age to manage the daily onslaught of emails.