Are You Wasting Your Time?!

Video Transcript: 24 January 2024

Hello everybody, this is, Patrick, from the Shire, about to ramble on, but maybe not so much because this is about how you should not waste your time. So what I wanted to begin with is a question that Lizzie, asked me, which is very pertinent, I bang on about Positive Outliers, but what exactly is a Positive Outlier?

This all began with some research that we did over 10 years ago, my colleague and I, John Edmonds, into the behaviours of the top 5 percent of change leaders. And this led me on a journey of discovery. 

First of all, I wrote a book, about what these change leaders did that was different in the way that they engaged people who were involved in their change or affected by it.

Technically this is called stakeholder engagement, but it’s really all about people. I wrote that book, it became very popular, [00:01:00] in fact it became a core reference. 

But it wasn’t the only thing that we saw in the behaviours of these Positive Outliers. There were certain things that they did in their private lives, in terms of forming their own thinking, and I published another book a couple of years later called Leading Yourself, and that’s really what I wanted to talk to you about. Most of us haven’t got time to read my two books. 

So what I’ve done is to distill that into a very short ebook, and I’ve revised and revised and revised that ebook to make it brief for you. We’ve now got the fifth edition of the Seven Keys to Exceptional Work. It’s only 17 pages. So if you want the gist of what we’re discovering about high performers, Positive Outliers, particularly in the context of change, you’ve got it there in that brief ebook.

Link below. 

But also, I’m concerned about you not wasting your time. We talk about non-renewable resources, and there’s much debate about fossil fuels. And I think of the tragedy of the Gulf of Mexico oil spillage, and all the waste there, apart from the pollution, of energy that could have been put to good use.