“…men are little islands…women bring with them a different perspective…”

…says Pen Hadow, the Artic Explorer and who has recently joined Fidelio Partners the board advisory and executive search firm, in today’s FT. He had established the first women’s polar expeditions and noticed how women behave differently under stress. I met him a few times about seven years ago and read his book, Solo. He struck me then as someone who is incredibly driven but with deep insight and I suspect he will achieve his goal in his new career to use his “experience to bring about change in perspective…having an effect on a group to enhance it, change their view of themselves”. These, it seems to me, are incredibly fulfilling objectives for him and hugely useful for his clients.

Ciaran

[kee-ron]

Executive hubris can be detected in speech patterns…

…according to research reported into today’s FT.In an excellent piece by Gillian Tett she refers to work carried out by London neurology Professor Peter Garrard and separately from the old country, Professor Niamh Brennan and graduate John Conroy at University College Dublin. The upshot is that you can detect hubris in the speech patterns of leaders. This comes as no surprise. Wouldn’t it be great if business and political leaders had to pass an annual Hubris Test like an MOT? We’d all be safer and wouldn’t it be hilarious?

Ciaran

[kee-ron]

La Grande Bellezza is one of the most beautiful films I…

…have ever seen about the human condition.

Ciaran

If Ng, Dalio, & Leitch are into meditation, what does that mean for the rest of us?

John Paul Rathbone wrote in Tuesday’s FT: “…odd as it may seem that financiers, often lambasted for their lack of ethics, are looking to meditation in the wake of the financial crisis, it may be because of the crisis that more are turning to it”.

This trend is interesting. In my own work I notice an increasingly willingness of senior clients to explore “mindfulness”.

However, Rathbone righty ends this piece with a challenge: “Whether that [it] will make a difference to the ethics of the financial world is an open question”

Ciaran Fenton

[kee-ron]