Vision: A Pillar of Leadership

Vision’s infinite range of influence knows no boundaries. It flows from the youngest to the oldest, from the novice to the most experienced member of the team. It infiltrates the organization with freshness of purpose and clearness of direction. The leader clothed with the clarity of vision, exposes others to the knowledge, necessity and power of vision. Then becomes an instrument in helping them understand the work of vision. The energy and the contagiousness of vision develops a persistent personality within the leader and within the organization that recognizes it and seeks after it. Vision helps every person within the organization to see that the role of leader calls their name and refers to them as the leader in their area of influence. This keen awareness awakens dreams that ignite the hearts, inspire the minds and move the people to greatness.

Questions are presented to help the leader reflect on the current state and identify important next steps that will propel the organization forward. Examples and strategies are included which the leader can employ to inspire vision within others and strengthen partnerships with them that build up the organization and help it move to its highest level of effectiveness.  

Tracking the Panthera family

Embark on a magnificent adventure in the trails of the big cat animals, all belonging to the Panthera family. With stunning photos, exciting field stories and informative factual texts, the photographer Jan Fleischmann and the factual writer Maria Veneke Ylikomi guide the readers to the large cats’ territories; the tiger’s jungles, the savannahs and bush forests where the lion and leopard are residing, and the rivers and wetlands where the mighty jaguar is roaming. We also meet the fifth member of the Panthera family, the elusive snow leopard, who is the master of the mountains in Central Asia.What’s on the jaguar’s menu?How does the tiger live?Who are the enemies of the lion?How to see the difference between a jaguar and a leopard?The answers are found in the book, where we also get acquainted with some of the scientists and nature guides who are fighting for the big threatened felines.

The Knowing and Caring Profession

Teaching has always struggled with its identity. Is it a profession? A vocation? Something that people who can’t do anything else fall into? A safety net or a career?

Is it a walk in the park? All those holidays. Something anyone can do, let’s face it, we all went to school.

Or is it a complex, challenging, somewhat maligned and misunderstood profession made up of exceptional and perhaps not so exceptional members. How would we know?

The Knowing and Caring Profession takes a look behind the rhetoric and rigmarole, to explore education and more specifically the education profession through a variety of lenses.

Phil Lambert’s approach to education, teaching and the broader profession is at times confronting, challenging and controversial. At its heart, it is an exploration of education by a teacher, a bureaucrat, an academic, a leader and a parent, all rolled in to one.

Phil brings a different perspective to many of the complex and challenging facets of education. From curriculum and class sizes to teacher education and student learning outcomes, Phil distils what can be polarising and emotive topics into easy to digest, fascinating and, at times, funny anecdotes and examples for non-educators.

Anyone who has even a passing interest or involvement with the education system will gain significant insight and understanding of what is truly at its very core, a knowing and caring profession.

The Gay Bible

This book is a guide to queer terminology. It contains correct terminology and slurs. It’s a what to say and what not to say. The world of gay and queer terms can be difficult to navigate when it seems new terms are appearing every other day. No one is saying you must agree with them, but we are saying you’ve got to respect a human for what they wish to be called. So, strap in and strap on for the ride of your life.

The Future Knowledge Compendium

Thriving in the 21^st Century

Humans have a unique capability to both understand their situation in the world and to envision and act to realise their aspirations in the emerging world. And most of us would welcome knowing how we can become ever more skilful at both understanding, and shaping the future of, our emerging world, so that we can thrive in it. The 21^st century is very different from the 20^th century. Globalisation, the greatest economic prosperity uplifting machine humanity has ever invented, and mass education, are combining to sweep humanity into an emerging interdependent global village. It is creating a global educated middle class that will number 5 billion in 2030.

In this emerging world, a world where our future prosperity will be increasingly based on metaphysical wealth, on what we know, 20^th century nation-first, competitive, win/lose, mindsets and agendas can no longer work. These now yesteryear mindsets will instead undermine our best endeavours, including making our future ever more climate and pandemic safe.

Humanity is now beginning to learn that it now has no option but to adopt planet-first, collaborative, win/win values and mindsets, if it wishes to shape our emerging global village so that it can become liveable for all: ever more prosperous, harmonious, inclusive, sustainable, healthy, and secure. Meeting these challenges successfully will require that humanity innovates for itself a new future knowledge curriculum so that it can economically thrive in a sustainable and humane manner.

Peter Ellyard has asked the question: what would be the contents of such a curriculum? In The Future Knowledge Compendium: A Curriculum for Thriving in the 21^st Century, he has sought to answer this question.

The Chinese Warren Buffett

“The Chinese Warren Buffett” The King of 1% Weekly Returns

Sheeny Shadow Narratives

Quantum computers are on the doorstep and artificial intelligence has already entered our living rooms. Research breakthroughs determine the latest company’s stock values. Reasonable investment volumes and financial funding frameworks are in place. This signals that profitable applications are within sight and the pace of development is increasing rapidly.

Corporate business and governments are powerful drivers, offering personalized products for users, entertainment for followers and safety for all. Global communication is at our fingertips. Intuitive robots act in tandem with factory workers, artists, and scientists.

But services “for free” come at a price. Revolutionary technologies will soon disrupt markets and shake up societies. Individuals will pay with a loss of privacy and personal autonomy. Intuitive algorithms will challenge artistic creativity. Unlimited computing power will call art and science into question. We have no clue yet how a mesh of quantum computers (QC) and swarms of artificial intelligence (AI) will fundamentally change art and science.

Yet we mostly ignore a debate on our cohabitation with novel technologies. Could artists resist the domestication by intelligent robots? Just now artists and scientists erratically meander to escape the inevitable. Are we ready to enter an informed public discourse? We experiment with burning answers in our encounter with cold machines.

My Value or My Values - Redeeming Customers' Trust

If you want to read business books that tell you what to do, how to create a better business and how to avoid the pitfalls, don't read any of the Strategies to Go.

Strategies to Go, like coffee to go, are stories you can take away, read on the go and draw your own conclusions based on what will work best for you and your business.

They are based on true stories and tell it like it is, what really happens in business, allowing you to learn the lessons that fit your needs and the strategic needs of your business.

Most of us spend 1/3rd of our lives sleeping, 1/3rd of our lives at work (at least) and cram everything else into the final 1/3rd. Given the investments that we make in time, shouldn't we be very clear about what makes us get up in the morning, go to work each day to do what we do?
This book tells a story in a unique way and asks these questions. Without launching into the answers, it takes you on a journey that inspires you to go and find the answers for yourself. After all, your career is all about your choices and your life. What you choose to do can define who you are. If you choose to spend your time with others who have shared values, together you can make a difference and achieve great things. At the same time, you might even have some fun and do something truly worthwhile!
If you choose otherwise, you may miss out…it's up to you…

Brian Watson – Group Manager

Laboratories AsureQuality Limited 

My Value or My Values - Rebirth of a Fallen Company

If you want to read business books that tell you what to do - how to create a better business - how to avoid the pitfalls – don’t read any of the “Strategies to Go…”

Strategies to go … like coffee to go… are designed as stories you can take-away, read on the go, and draw your own conclusions based on what will work best for you and your business.

They tell it like it is – what really happens in business – allowing you to learn the lessons that fit your needs and the strategic needs of your business.

Based on the lives and businesses of real people the characters are based on a composite of heroes and villains I have worked with.  You will share their frustrations and anger, the exuberance of their success and their pain of losing, and most of all you will learn from their experiences.

Mundane Insurance

Manufacturing industries are a common knowledge as are the likes of the motor car, television, foodstuffs and electrical goods that exist around us every day and are forcefully advertised. Banking too but it is only true to a lesser degree regarding insurance because if canvasing the average person in the street about insurance they would think only about their life insurance, health insurance, motor cover, house and contents, pet plan insurance and so on. Put like that, it is all very wearisome and therefore hardly a subject worth writing about, or is it? That was certainly the author’s impression of insurance even up to the point of moving into the financial sector from manufacturing industry.

Pursuing the subject a step further, hazarding a guess, if those very same people were quizzed regarding the types of people they imagined are employed in insurance they would probably describe their insurance broker or simply a voice at an insurance call centre. This account therefore will, in all probability, dispel the notion that all insurance dealings are routine and in the main, predictable as did an international group of young insurance delegates at a Middle East seminar, many of whom were totally unaware that the insurance industry’s activities were so diverse.

Life of Brain

This book is about everything that goes on in your conscious experience: sensations, perceptions, feelings, thoughts, imagination, plans, expectations. It’s also about your conscious experience of self, the sense that there is a YOU behind everything, a YOU that is having all these experiences, a YOU that seems to control all those activities of the mind.

Some of the questions it explores:

- What is conscious experience?

- How did it evolve?

- Why did it evolve?

- How does it develop in the young child?

- What can we do with it?

- Why might it cause us problems?

- Why is it still a mystery?

This book is NOT about the neurological landscape and its functions studied by the neuroscientist armed with the latest fMRI technology (which incidentally measures brain activity indirectly through the flow of blood in response to different tasks). You don’t have to know brain anatomy, you don’t have to tell your hippocampus from your hypothalamus.

This book will be of interest to YOU if you have ever wondered about the nature of conscious experience and the workings of your own consciousness. It may well tell you more about YOU than any other book you have ever read.

Students of psychology, philosophy and evolution will find it of particular relevance to their areas of inquiry.

Life of a Psychic/Medium

Do you often question what happens when we die, where do we go, is there life beyond this world? With my acquired knowledge and true stories, I would like to open your heart and your mind to the spiritual world, giving you a true understanding of Angels, Ghosts and Spirits, and how you can be just like me. Yes, I said it – how you can become a medium and connect to life after death!