May 2011

Are you being left behind?

With an ever challenging Corporate Environment business leaders would agree there is a need to take a renewed view of how to best maximise the output from the employees they have. Organisations are challenged to attract, retain, engage and enhance productivity from scarce resources. In addition to this already significant and consuming challenge, many corporations realise that if they haven’t already, they now need to get serious about how to lessen their global footprint, increase their corporate social responsibility, and make a positive contribution toward the wellness of the planet. Where does your organisation rate on these areas? Are you leading the way like some of the top corporate businesses in Australia and around the world? Are you flourishing when it comes to the people within your business and the impact you are having on the community and planet? If the answer is NO, what affect might this have on your business? These are the questions you need to be asking. Beyond this you need to be searching for new answers, be involved in new conversations and push the boundaries of what is not only feasible to drive your business into new frontiers, but  what is possible at every edge of the boundaries. The businesses that thrive in this decade and beyond will be those who are willing to engage innovative thinking, push boundaries, take a fresh look at their values and be brave enough to start a new conversation. That new conversation started at the World Wellness Project Summit. The inaugural summit was held in Melbourne, Australia where over 40 speakers from around the world came together to engage on the health of business, the health of individuals, and the wellness of the planet. The relatively new fields of positive psychology, positive organisational scholarship and workplace wellbeing are becoming robust […]

Osama bin Laden is dead

 His body has been recovered by US authorities, US President Barack Obama has confirmed after a fire fight with US forces. Obama made the dramatic announcement in a hastily called, late-night appearance  at the White House. Obama said  the US had enough evidence last week to launch an operation against a compound where bin Laden was believed to be hiding in Pakistan. A small team of US soldiers landed in the compound and after a firefight killed bin Laden. They had his body. DNA tests confirmed it was bin Laden’s body. a

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

Bestselling author Barbara Kingsolver returns with her first nonfiction narrative that will open your eyes in a hundred new ways to an old truth: You are what you eat. “As the U.S. population made an unprecedented mad dash for the Sun Belt, one carload of us paddled against the tide, heading for the Promised Land where water falls from the sky and green stuff grows all around. We were about to begin the adventure of realigning our lives with our food chain. “Naturally, our first stop was to buy junk food and fossil fuel. . . .” Hang on for the ride: With characteristic poetry and pluck, Barbara Kingsolver and her family sweep readers along on their journey away from the industrial-food pipeline to a rural life in which they vow to buy only food raised in their own neighborhood, grow it themselves, or learn to live without it. Their good-humored search yields surprising discoveries about turkey sex life and overly zealous zucchini plants, en route to a food culture that’s better for the neighborhood and also better on the table. Part memoir, part journalistic investigation, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle makes a passionate case for putting the kitchen back at the center of family life and diversified farms at the center of the American diet.  “This is the story of a year in which we made every attempt to feed ourselves animals and vegetables whose provenance we really knew . . . and of how our family was changed by our first year of deliberately eating food produced from the same place where we worked, went to school, loved our neighbors, drank the water, and breathed the air.” “Kingsolver takes the genre to a new literary level; a well-paced narrative and the apparent ease of the beautiful prose makes the pages […]