Our ambition is to help our clients develop into skilled, purposeful, balanced leaders. The investment is immense and it is critical that they can stay the distance. Modern business leaders continually travel, often eating the wrong things at the wrong time and generally accumulating a sleep deficit. They drive themselves hard, drawing on outstanding mental and physical stamina. This comes at an unaffordable cost to the individual, family and business.

Our new expert, John Dent, has a vital role to play in ensuring clients are fit to lead. Debunking macho myths about becoming a buff, mean, lean fighting machine, he brings science to the leadership demands of playing the long game and works with individuals and teams to balance seemingly conflicting demands on time and attention. Like all WWS experts, John uses evidence-based tools and approaches to generate results quickly.

Meet John Dent and our Fit to Lead programmes

With close to half a million French people living in the UK, it is not surprising that demand for coaching and consulting services in French has soared. WWS has teamed up with Coach & Go, a firm that operates exclusively in French to enhance our capability out of London. Clients include major French banks, law firms and media agencies. For the francophones among you, their motto is: “Il vient toujours un temps où il faut choisir entre la contemplation et l’action” (Albert Camus). If you want to find out more or meet owners Séverine and Séverine, drop us a line at rapide@wwstrategies.com

When trying to grow our business, cash flow is one thing, our frame of mind is another. Averil will be a guest speaker at the annual Growth Strategies conference, sponsored by KPMG. Talking in an interactive session on the Pitfalls of Growth, she will argue there is no such thing as failure – only opportunities to learn. The conference will be held on 25 April in London. Find out more HERE.

Averil has just signed a contract to co-write a new book as part of the famous ‘Dummies’ series: the light-hearted way to communicate serious content. “Performance Coaching for Dummies will be a hands-on book covering practical aspects of coaching in the workplace” explains Averil. The series' unique style demands that authors go straight to the essence of the message without spending much energy on explaining the background research: "quite a shock but also an interesting challenge after writing a text-book for an academic publisher!" concludes Averil.

One of the little known aspects of risk management concerns is leadership continuity: how many leaders will be available to replace the current cohorts? What will motivate them? How can current senior managers anticipate the aspirations of Generation X and Y emerging leaders? These and other topics will be covered in a session François Moscovici will give at Oxford University’s Strategic Leadership Programme in May. For more information, contact François at WWS.

Turning Point is one of the UK’s largest social care providers and a prime example of what has been dubbed as ‘the third sector’: charities that use market mechanisms to deliver social services for people with complex needs. We have been working with the leadership at Turning Point for over a year now, including supporting the design and the delivery of the new strategy. To find out how Turning Point will treble its activities by 2012 in order to turn even more lives around every year, download a copy of the strategic plan.

When Jean-Christophe Bédos was head-hunted from his high flying job at Cartier to turn around jewellers to the royalty and stars, Boucheron, he thought: “it’s time to jump from the flight simulator to the real thing!” and quite a ride it has been… White Water Strategies has worked with Jean-Christophe and his team from day one and was fortunate both to participate in and observe strategy in real time.

There is still a lot to do, but the Gucci Group-owned business has declared profits a year ahead of schedule, recruitment has resumed and a dozen new stores have opened in the last two years, from Shanghai to Dubai, underpinned by a relaunch of all collections and the refit of the flagship store on Place Vendôme.

To find out how this rugby player (another one!) has restored Paris’ oldest high-end jeweller’s fortunes, click below:

View the Boucheron story

Our guest ‘opinionated person’ this quarter is Paul Oliver, head of Oxford-based strategy boutique Conduco Consulting.

In the words of the song, "everywhere you go, you always take the weather with you". Never was this more so than with teams in business and government. Why is it that following yet another stormy reorganisation, everybody ends up feeling like it’s a wet Wednesday in March? It’s because reshuffles are frequently ill-conceived, and focus only on the politics of the formal organisation. When I speak to the ‘armchair Generals’ who are the architects of theses reorganisations, I often hear complaints about resistance to change. My advice: watch and learn how resistance happens!

So-called teams on wall charts take months to get things wrong, but there are other types: informal teams that actually get things done. People collaborating together behave like weather systems: they are complex and unpredictable. They self-organise. If the relationship between any two team members at any given time can switch between four states – good, bad, so-so and don’t know – then the simplest team of three can operate in 4,096 moods! Add a single new team member and the permutations rise to over 68 billion; no wonder small changes to teams can be disruptive. And this is why predicting organisational behaviour is even harder than predicting the weather. Hence my first law: “If you can’t predict it, you can’t control it…"

Read more on how to use chaos theory to get things done

Few people in business would disagree with the concept of happiness as ‘a good thing’. Work consumes us, replacing religion and politics as our central focus, yet can lack soul. It has the capacity to bring us happiness and well-being but may not if left to chance. How do we ensure that we meet our business goals while also engaging hearts and minds fully? In the following books, concepts such as flow - when we are able to use our strengths in pursuit of the meaningful - and the nature of happiness, are examined from a business perspective. They are an enjoyable read and make a compelling business case for the use of Positive Psychology in leadership and business.

Easterbrook’s research demonstrates that for those in the West everything has been getting steadily better. Yet people are generally less satisfied. He argues the case that optimism, gratitude and acts of forgiveness are critical to self fulfilment and successful modern life.

Read this book, even if only to show off your pronunciation of the writer’s Hungarian name (Cheeks sent me high). He deals with the very topical subject of building a responsible, sustainable business that grows its employees and contributes to society. Csikszentmihalyi identifies and makes a case for the factors crucial to the operation of a good business.