Leadership

If you could imagine a modern day Neptune then perhaps he might look like this. Piercing blue eyes, broad chest to fit the massive lungs and pectorals needed to swim the world’s most dangerous oceans. There might be a map of the sea behind him. A bookshelf filled with books on the marine environment, inspirational humans, maps of the world. His father’s naval cap might sit on top of a...

It’s fair to say that spring of 2020 was one of the hardest times of my life. The world in a global pandemic, mass uncertainty, everyone coming to me for the answers, my routine thrown out and a new normal with tough restrictions really took its toll on my mental health. I have suffered with anxiety for four years. In 2017 I had a breakdown and since then I have been on a road of...

Ciaran Bird played flanker for London Irish for ten years, three of them as a professional at the start of the new era. Talking to him however, is not so much a case of chatting with a rugby player made good in the commercial world, as a business leader who spent ten years of his career doubling up as a first class rugby player. Rugby’s flanks have produced some redoubtable leaders...

“We’re all looking to cluster around shaping the future of real estate for a better world – that’s our North Star.” Times certainly are a changing. Not just in terms of leadership, technology and globalisation but in the very nature of business itself. I really can’t imagine an interview at the start of my career that would have ended with a statement like that from a senior...

In 1997, coming up 28 years of age, I bagged probably one of the best jobs in sport, ever, and given how things panned out, maybe THE best job in sport, ever. Word inside the sports industry was that this was possibly going to be the last ever Lions Tour. It wasn’t commercially attractive enough. They hadn’t won a Series for 23 years. The Lions were headed down the same slope as the...