Ben Coker

The Spiral of Life It’s not a ‘circle’ or a ‘wheel’ There are many coaches and the like out there who talk about the ‘circle of life. Dividing your life activities into varying numbers of sectors and then analysing and assessing them to give a ‘score’, often out of 10, for each life area. I’ve seen this done with anything between four and twenty sectors. The process then is more often than not to ‘balance’ these sectors, so they all have the same score and form a circle. Do more of those with a low score and less of those…

Communications Breakdown “What we have here is a failure to communicate” “What we have here is a failure to communicate” – Rod Steiger to Sidney Poitier in the 1967 movie ‘In the Heat of the Night’. It is said we live in the ‘communication age’ – well, we may be in an ‘information age’ but there’s not a great deal of communication going on. It’s more of a ‘Tower of Babel’ situation. It seems everyone is talking at once and not many are listening, really listening. The late Steve Shapiro, a sales coach and speaker, described the two magic words…

The Decision is Yours But what Happens next? “There is a single mental move you can make which, in a millisecond, will solve enormous problems for you. It has the potential to improve almost any personal or business situation you will ever encounter … and it could literally propel you down the path to incredible success. We have a name for this magic mental activity … it is called DECISION” – Bob Proctor It’s not clear though which comes first, the decision or the choice? For some it’s the choice to decide and for others the decision to choose. The…

The Story of Pat and Mick There’s no such thing as a straight line This is a story about Pat and Mick. Pat was a customer of mine when I ran a printing business in Liverpool. I used to typeset and print his newsletter, so I got to know quite a lot about his thinking. Mick was my next door neighbour in Knutsford, and we spent some time in conversation. Pat and Mick had something in common – they were both Professors of Economics, one at Liverpool, the other at Manchester and the European University in Florence. One was economic…

Reinventing the World – Part 2 Taking Back Control There are degrees of centralisation and decentralisation. They perhaps overlap a little in the middle but at one extreme is total autocratic control – dictatorship – and at the other anarchy by which I mean absence of any cohesive principle such as  common standard or purpose and the lack of any ‘connection’ between individuals which puts it beyond any form of decentralisation and into simple chaos. Decentralisation is not about a complete lack of order or organisation, more about absence of power and control over individuals by a group of people…

Reinventing the World – Part 1 The Story So Far – How did we get to where we are now? From the last two articles you’ll probably have guessed I might be talking about the phenomena of centralisation and decentralisation, and you’ve probably also guessed I’m a proponent of the latter. Many people are talking of decentralisation as something new. In fact its exactly the opposite, Decentralisation is the way things were for millennia but I’m not proposing we go back to the Middle Ages and beyond. Back then, and up until now, it has always seemed centralisation, putting things…

The Business Paradigm What is ‘business’ really all about and why has it gone ‘wrong’? ‘Business’ is a term which has many people confused. There are many different ideas about what a business actually IS, what it does and how it operates. The problem arises because there are so many different forms and functions of ‘business’. They range from ‘micro’ one person operations to multi-billion global corporations employing many thousands of people. The media and ‘popular culture’ tend to lump these all together under the one heading – ‘business’. But there are businesses who employ people and those who don’t,…

The Enemy of Change? What is it holding us back from incremental and significant change in our society? It’s about time we stopped expecting our elected and unelected politicians to be able to do, fix, or change anything. Having been one, albeit at a low level and not connected with any particular faction or party, I know how difficult it is to make things happen or stop anything happening. You see, we don’t live in a democracy. We may use  some form of democracy to elect our representatives but to whom are they ‘representing’ us? Originally it was to ‘the…

Are We Measuring the Wrong Things? And Are We Measuring All We Need? To paraphrase my friend Peter Thomson ‘every action has a corresponding measurement’, Indeed every action we take should be measured – even to the extent without  measuring it’s not worth taking the action. You see unless we measure what we do then we have no idea how effective it is in achieving the result we are looking for. But there is an assumption here which is about what exactly it is which needs to be measured as there are many aspects or options in measurement. As a…