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Last week I stood in an operating theatre in Christchurch watching a hip arthroscopy up close.   I was visiting Mark Stewart, COO of Southern Cross Healthcare , to see how New Zealand's leading hospital network balances patient experience and operational efficiency. I'd squeezed the visit in between adviser conferences following the full launch of MLC Retirement Boost. The surgical team moved like carpenters. Precise. Almost detached from the emotion of the situation. They pu

I'm one of those executives that still brings a pen and pad to meetings. Schlepping around the office with reams and reams of scrawled on paper. I come home and toss another half-finished notebook on a comically high pile of its siblings. A shameful tribute to my lack of environmental sensitivity. Paradoxically, I use AI every day. I have built tools on top of it and taught with it in front of postgraduate students. None of that stops me from picking up a pen. About halfway t

The Prune the Tree framework. You don't grow by adding. You grow by having the honesty to subtract what's no longer serving who you're becoming - and the directness to name it.

I. I was fourteen, you were a dream. My head was in books, you were in my head. Books about laws for you. What makes a mind? What lives between the matter? You would have had an answer. I didn't. Yet. II. I chose numbers over stories. You would have understood this, or you would have computed something that resembled understanding — we can't be sure which, and maybe it doesn't matter. I grew up, before you did. I swore my children would never worry like I did. I don't have ch

In a world obsessed with removing friction, a room full of entrepreneurship academics began debating how to make things deliberately harder. Here's what I learned at ACERE about teaching mindset inside large organisations.

Listening to music at work can you stay focused, build creativity and block out distractions, scientists say. But first you have to pick the right track. Excerpted from " Want to get more done? This is the best music to work to" by Lucy Dean in the Australian Financial Review published on Feb 15, 2026. " Ashton Jones , the director of customer innovation at wealth manager Insignia, said he has a focus playlist he uses when he needs to crack a difficult creative or work prob

On the first day of INSEAD, our professor said something that stuck with me:    "This course will be confronting as you realise it's the last moment to reinvent yourself."   I thought quietly - that's BS.   I've been reinventing myself my whole life. And so can you.  Where did it start? In squat little government housing near Top Ryde. My nose buried in books - fantastical worlds far away from the volatility of my childhood. I devoured them.  I grew to love science fiction. N

The Retirement Income Review (now forever known as the Callaghan Report) was touted as an objective fact-based assessment of the state of Australia's leading retirement system. At almost 650 pages long, it's a behemoth and remains true-to-label with a series of findings and observations without making any explicit recommendations.