Invest In Loss

I just want to re-assure readers that Invest In Loss isn’t dead or abandoned!

Since setting up this blog to explore what it means to be a good manager, there have been a couple of large changes in my life that have had to take priority.

I’ve found myself having to step forward and take on my instructor’s Tai Chi class. My instructor, and the art of Tai Chi, have both had a major influence on the Invest In Loss philosophy that I’ve been working on. I owe him a debt that can never be repaid; the least I can do is to continue his class until he returns. (If you’d like to know how the class is going, I’ve setup a Tai Chi blog over on my personal website).

I’ve also been working away a lot in recent months. During the summer, I stepped into a project part way through, and applied this philosophy to ensure that we got the Explore website out the door on time and on budget. On the back of that success, I’ve been seconded to the Ordnance Survey to help them in a small way on the next set of features for Explore. The secondment leaves me hundreds of miles away from home, and from my library of books that I’m relying on whilst I explore the ‘You’ aspect of being a manager.

The secondment should come to an end before Easter, and then I hope to be back blogging about good management and the Invest In Loss philosophy.

The next article is slowly taking shape. It will be called ‘First Steps As A Manager: Managing One’, and it will draw heavily on John Wooden’s Pyramid of Success. John Wooden was an American college basketball coach during the 20th century, and a key part of his amazing record at UCLA was a 16-part approach to how you should manage yourself. I’ve worked for some great managers over the years, and I’ve had my fair share of outright awful ones too. All the great managers had fantastic self-management, and they lead by example. Definitely “do as I do, not as I say” people, if you know what I mean. And, equally, all the terrible managers had terrible self-management, with their personal problems always spilling out into the way they managed others.

If you’ve never heard of Wooden, and you’d like to become a better management, pick yourself up a copy of ‘Wooden on leadership’. His work has been an inspiration to countless people over the last thirty+ years; if the Invest In Loss philosophy is for you, then his work should be a great inspiration for you too.

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