What works for you when a big event is approaching - Do you prefer to count-down the days that you have left in order to put the pressure on to get ready in time? Maybe you prefer to count-up the days to the deadline so you feel like you're building…

There's a definition of learning in some areas of psychology that goes along the lines of: "Learning is only said to have taken place when you can observe a relatively permanent change in behaviour." We find that a very useful performance focused definition as it really makes us make sure…

Seems a little strange to us that confidence is so important, yet treated so strangely. Just think, if you're not feeling that confident, it's not really the done thing to go around letting people know that you're not feeling very confident (wow, they're on the way out) and could do…

In this 3 minute video on the BBC Sport website, Mike Singletary, coach of US football's San Francisco 49ers and GB's Olympic gold medal winning rower Mark Hunter compare notes and similarities on what it takes to achieve greatness in whatever you do. We love the refernces to beliefs, teams…

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.” Antoine de Saint-Exupery

So, to save you from reading the Dan Pink article, the challenge he finishes off with is a useful one. "So try an experiment. For the next seven days, go monolingual and speak only human at work. Don’t say anything to your boss, your staff, your teammate, your supplier or…

Well... speaking human actually. A great article from Dan Pink in the Telegraph, where he speaks about something pretty important to us at K2... being human (it's one of our core values and one that you'd think was pretty easy to deliver on...). How good are you at speaking human?…

Have a read of this BBC piece relating to Tony Blair's views of Gordon Brown. A particularly useful extract is: Blair says Mr Brown lacked political instinct "at the human gut level" adding: "Political calculation, yes. Political feelings, no. Analytical intelligence, absolutely. Emotional intelligence, zero." Some interesting observations and helps…

At a recent all day meeting we had a play around with a new way of managing the agenda. Instead of running through in a predefined order, we simply created a meeting lucky dip. All of the sections of the agenda went into a hat, we then picked out one…

Although we use Basecamp already here at K2 and love how the people at 37Signals work, we had't really realised what high performance role models they were until we read, Rework, the superbly irreverent but always relevant business book, by the founders of 37Signals. It's packed full of excellent examples…