When asking existing partners in professional services firms the one leadership quality they find hardest to teach, they invariably list gravitas first. When asking middle management teams what is the most important quality they expect from their leaders, inspiration is what is often missing. Our aim at WWS is to develop balanced leaders, and this includes making you and your peers effortlessly visible to your staff, colleagues and the outside world.

Accelerating the acquisition of the relevant skills requires both practice and a diverse set of inputs from disciplines ranging from the theatre, to psychology, creative writing and improvisation. Our latest expert, David Roylance, is a stage director, voice coach, Alexander technique tutor and a fine actor. We have worked with David to develop specific programmes for both emerging and confirmed leaders in the areas of gravitas, inspiration and stage presence – for these really important speeches.

Meet David and find out more about our Visible Leader programmes.

David Nish, Group Finance Director of Standard Life, was the host of our recent Talent Management breakfast in Edinburgh. He outlines his views on why investing in specific Talent activities is essential to modern businesses:

“We live in an unpredictable world today. In business, markets are increasingly interconnected while reputation is valuable and fragile; governments are delegating social policy and individual responsibility is heightened. The environmental factor is here to stay and it is growing - and there is a high cost in terms of employee loyalty and quality of service. Not surprisingly, fear and insecurity for both companies and individuals is abundant.

Find out about David’s views on investing in Talent

You may remember that we were asked by Sky News to comment on Tony Blair’s impending departure last year. Quite logically, we were asked to comment on the arrival of his successor too, particularly in light of our experience coaching CEOs during their first 100 days… Finance Week built on our views in a humorous piece entitled: “FD steps up to lead the world’s first industrial empire”. Click here to read the article. And monitor your business press carefully: the verdict on the First 100 Days is only about 3 weeks away…

Thank you to all of you who attended our recent business breakfast meetings on Talent Management in London, Glasgow and Edinburgh. According to your written feedback they were a great success: you enjoyed our relaxed approach; the robust statistics on future trends; and the big-picture-yet-practical perspective we provide at WWS. So many of you want further briefings on leadership in general, but also specifically on succession and on coaching. Watch this space for news of more busy breakfasts coming your way!

With hundreds of books about coaching hitting the shelves every year, it is often difficult to – literally – judge them by their cover. As you know, we are pretty proud of our own tome Essential Business Coaching, but there was no independent review available until now. We are pleased to report that the Human Resource Management Journal (Vol. 17 no.1) has published an in-depth analysis.

Raising talent management as a board issue was high on Rosemary McGinness’s agenda when she joined the family-owned spirits manufacturer two years ago. As a highly entrepreneurial business the company had this “how did we become so big?” moment. Few outsiders know for example that beyond the large eponymous William Grant & Sons Ltd whisky blend, WGS also makes Glenfiddich, the world’s best-selling single malt. And so Rosemary called in WWS’s Colin Duthie to design a talent programme for the top 100 people. “The best thing about working with Colin is that he operates at strategic level and is also extremely practical. He’s a mine of knowledge on which courses our senior people should attend around the world for example.” CLICK here to find out more about Rosemary’s atypical career, her views on coaching and how Colin engaged WGS’s CEO on the talent journey.

The recent spat between Ryanair and Eurostar was quite amusing in light of the fact that nobody mentioned the time wasted at the airport in the various calculations… Having spent far too much time on delayed UK business travel myself, including being re-routed to Southend Airport at 11pm with no transport back into London, the title of this opinion piece may seem a tad provocative… Surely, there can’t be a way to turn cattle security checks and knees-under-your-chin seats into something pleasurable?  With the help of Positive Psychology, Averil shows us how to travel like it is a holiday…

This quarter we move away from business books and cover recent political reporting; but there is a catch: there are more management lessons in our tome than in a year’s worth of Harvard Business Review…

Veteran Washington reporter Woodward (of Watergate fame) completes his series on the Iraq war. This third instalment is a fascinating and comprehensive analysis of decision processes before, during and after the military operation.

Independently of your views on the merit of the war, you will be fascinated by the management learning contained in this book. There are over 500 pages of examples of motivated, hard-working, loyal people getting it spectacularly wrong while using the best management tools, technology and financial resources.

For example: how Bush did not follow his instinct and hired Rumsfled, simply to show his father he had better judgement. Rumsfeld then micro-managed and terrorised his staff until he became surrounded by an empire of yes-men. Or how Bush’s approach to problem solving was spot-on (lots of questions, lots of insightful thinking) but he was operating in a strategic vacuum with a desire for good news at all costs. And then there was the in-fighting between the Pentagon and State Department which led to an absence of effective overall strategy for more than three years.

This book is The Office on a huge scale: page after page you cannot quite believe the dynamics that lead to this huge crash in slow motion. I think that it will be the source of case studies for years to come.