"I believe the real difference between success and failure in a corporation can be very often traced to the question of how well the organization brings out the great energies and talents of its people." — Thomas J. Watson, Jr.

For many years now I have been on the receiving end of Mike's teasing, most of which is either funny or exasperating but always entertaining. A fortunate by-product of having children was that his attention was diverted onto them as it was far easier to wind them up when they were younger. But as they went off to university and their adult lives, the focus of his teasing returned to me.(I'm not sure that having B&B guests around will be as effective a diversionary tactic as having children).

During those intervening years I had resumed my career and along the way, as a result of my love of reading and learning, have accumulated over one hundred books on leadership and management. I lend these out to those that are similarly interested (and thereby achieved my childhood ambition of being a librarian!). The management sections of bookshops is always the place where I start and my management books were amongst the first things to be unpacked when we moved last year.

Most of the time this teasing washes over me but there are a few subjects that are guaranteed to get me to respond and sucked into a debate. Discussions on my management books is one but I'm certainly not going to highlight what the others are. A couple of years ago Mike had to attend a two day management and leadership course. He came home after the first day and promptly declared that 'all this management stuff is *********" and although I knew he was only winding me up, I nevertheless got drawn into a heated discussion. The next evening after the conclusion of the course (and with an apologetic bunch of flowers in hand) he had to admit that he had learnt some useful things and that he had been wrong.

Just last week he asked me just how bad a manager I would be if I didn't have one hundred management books to refer to (the answer he got was that I'd just be average rather than excellent!!!)

I'm a great advocate of people using their strengths at work and the quote above suggests that businesses will only be successful if the people in the business are using their strengths. For the last six months Mike has been busy day by day getting our B&B business ready to open; we are now in a position to accept guests and we had our first official booking yesterday :-). And as you will know he has been documenting the progress of our B&B via this blog and in doing so has demonstrated a hitherto unseen talent for writing.

But years of experience in management have clearly had an impact on him too, so much so that unbeknown to me, he has been writing a second blog; his very own take on management and leadership. You can find the blog at www.grassrootmanager.blogspot.com

Irritatingly, amongst the humour and poking of fun, there are some genuinely sound theories in there. (I must have had some influence on him after all).

But I'm glad that after years of hard labour and extremely long hours, he is finally getting the opportunity to release the talents he has, whether that be charming our B&B guests, writing blogs and most importantly pursuing his love of photography.

There won't be many times in this blog that I get to quote my favourite author of management books but here he is:


"Great management is not about changing people.  Great managers take people as is and then focus on releasing their talents.
- Marcus Buckingham