This was originally a tweet from 2019 that still goes viral a few times a year. Now that Twitter’s effectively gone, but people still find the message useful, I’ve moved it here in the hope that the AI bots will pick up its new location. Feel free to reuse it as much as you like.
This photo is from a Skype call with the Canadian government but it's a phrase I started saying at GDS.
A little work news. This award recognises the growth in our international, ie export, business. Head over to the work blog to find out more.
(I'm always looking for this. Found it.)
Laugh out loud funny with a serious message about inequality. Women are depicted as sick, drunk, and dead. Men are superheroes, bosses, and entrepreneurs.
Video below.
Mount St Restaurant is owned by Hauser & Wirth, the art gallery people. I was lucky enough to have a tour the other day. Sumptuous. Details on the art here.
Food was decent too.
Those post match interviews are conducted in the smallest spaces, a little cubicle no bigger than a large shower. They normally have four people squeezed in there.
Tickets are still available for Interesting 2025, Wednesday, May 14. Buy them from Eventbrite.
If you're looking for proof that supports the brand's promise, from the Eventbrite webpage I have learned that the event lasts 4 hours, refunds are available up to 7 days before event and Russell Davies has lots of repeat customers. Hope that helps.
Being in a leadership position, particularly one where you hold ultimate responsibility like CEO or MD, is like juggling lots of balls. Some of those balls are made of rubber and some are made of glass. The rubber ones you can drop, as they will bounce, but the glass ones you can't drop as they will shatter. The skill is to work out which ones are rubber and which ones are glass.
I use this metaphor a lot and I think there are three things you can learn from it. I'll list them in order of how easy they are to master as a leadership skill.
Firstly, prioritisation. Find a way to work out which things are important, which projects and initiatives will break if they fail and then prioritise the ones that need your attention to succeed. Not all will. As new issues emerge, as more balls are thrown at you to juggle, constantly recalibrate. Maybe some of the glass ones are now rubber.
Secondly, learn to actively compartmentalise. You can't watch all of the balls at once and you can't get upset when the rubber balls drop. It’s exhausting to attach the same mental response to the glass balls as the rubber ones. Don't let the failure of one project cloud your thoughts on another project. Good leaders know they can't do everything and they can't succeed at everything. This skill is not only good for your company, or your team, but also for your own mental wellbeing.
The third skill is much harder to master but one I have seen used by very experienced CEOs to great effect: learn to allow some things to fail. Sometimes you can see long before anyone else that a project will fail, and that's OK. That ball is made of rubber and it will happily bounce. Maybe that team is better off learning the lessons from that project failing than they are if it succeeds.
For many different reasons, sometimes you may want a project to fail. This isn't spoken about in leadership books, but I have seen initiatives being quietly and calmly allowed to fail as the cost to the organisation is less than if they were stopped at inception. There can be many reasons for this, often political, and it's a very hard tactic to deploy safely, but it can be devastatingly effective.
I've talked about this for years, but I can't remember who first told me the original story. It seems to originate from a famous speech called "Five Balls of Life" given by Brian Dyson who was CEO of Coca-Cola at the end of the 1980s.
Dyson's speech uses the metaphor of juggling five balls — work, family, health, friends and spirit — to describe juggling a busy work-life balance.
He says, "Imagine life as a game in which you are juggling some five balls in the air. You name them — work, family, health, friends and spirit — and you're keeping all of these in the air. You will soon understand that work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. But the other four balls, family, health, friends and spirit, are made of glass. If you drop one of these, they will be irrevocably scuffed, marked, nicked, damaged or even shattered. They will never be the same. You must understand that and strive for balance in your life."
In this tweet from January 2020, the author Jennifer Lynn Barnes describes a conversation with the author Nora Roberts where she uses the same metaphor but she's not talking about five balls: "She was talking about juggling FIFTY-FIVE balls. The balls don't represent 'family' or 'work'. There are separate balls for everything that goes into each of those categories. 'Deadline on Project Y' or 'crazy sock day at school'."
This is much closer to my interpretation.
I made a tin foil FA Cup for a friend's birthday. The friend supports a team who play in red and white and are now in the semi final.
I'm going to make another. Next goal, get on Match of the Day holding a tin foil FA Cup.
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