David Olney 14 August, 2023 Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, I had noticed that a majority of people I engaged with day to day were becoming progressively more anxious about doing new activities. They would worry more about all of the things that could go wrong, and would procrastinate longer before starting in an […]
David Olney
Why You Should Provide A Bubble Of Safety And Responsibility For Your People
David Olney 4 July, 2023 Have you ever hired someone who performed brilliantly during the recruiting process, who looked more excited than nervous on their first day, only to have them leave within six months of starting with you? As they were leaving, did they tell you that they couldn’t settle into the […]
How to Direct Your Anger Before it Damages You, or Someone Else
During episodes of Blind Insights, I have spoken about my experience of consistently feeling angry as a consequence of being blind. I just finished listening to Moshe Ratson’s book, Anger Is Your Compass, and I wish his book had been available thirty years ago. If you regularly deal with feeling angry, I recommend that you […]
For Business Success, Reduce the Cognitive Burden on Your People and Your Customers
David Olney 12 June, 2023 The human brain is an amazing organ, but it has some major limitations, which we need to work with if we want to succeed in business. Most people can hold between 5 and 7 bits of information in their short-term memory for between 15 and thirty seconds. After that, they […]
Discussing history, leadership, heroes, and war with Christian Cameron
David Olney 8 June, 2023 Please join Tim and me as we discuss history, leadership, heroes, and war with author, Christian Cameron, on our latest episode of Blind Insights. Christian grew up beside an active archaeological site, had a career as an Intelligence Officer in the United States Navy, has been involved in historical re-enactment […]
Why success depends on balancing delayed and instant gratification
David Olney 28 April, 2023Now that I spend a lot of my working hours assisting small businesses to succeed, I am always looking for clear ways to explain important points and new ways to improve situations. When I wrote my recent blog post on The Founder’s Dilemma, I started thinking about what makes a business […]
The Founder’s Dilemma: Building your business without blunting your people
David Olney 27 March, 2023 During my years of working as a consultant, I have regularly discerned a gap between leaders’ vision of what their teams should be doing and their teams’ understanding of and ability to do what they do. In larger organisations, leaders regularly have a particular take on how to translate top […]
Leadership Lessons from The Long War
David Olney 23 February, 2023 After listening to a novel, I often come away with a new appreciation of a particular aspect of the human condition, and am reminded that stories are the best way to learn complex things. Sometimes, I listen to a novel and it both teaches me something new, as well as […]
Why do we need to belong to a community?
David Olney 1 February, 2023 While a group has common interests, a community shares the common value of wanting to improve the well-being of its members. The above sentence is a summary of the results of three weeks of reading and thinking. I started off by reading Mark Schaefer’s new book, Belonging to the Brand, […]
Why should life not be spent building a fortress?
David Olney 3 January, 2023 In my recent blog post, “Why should life be like a terraced hillside?”, I argued that people should create, plant, and build on several terraces as they explore the hillside of life. If people create terraces as they go, then the worst thing that can happen is that they will […]