Blog Archives

I remember a time many years ago when my wife and I were buying a new house. My brother, a lifetime builder with decades of calloused hands and a healthy dose of blunt honesty, came to check the place…

Read more

About 30 years ago, I decided to jump on a plane and perform the traditional Kiwi rite of passage. I embarked on my OE with an intent on seeing the world, meeting lots of people and getting up to…

Read more

It was a few years back at one of those glossy San Francisco tech conferences, the sort where the air smells faintly of kombucha and the keynote speakers all have a net worth that begins with a “B.” I’d…

Read more

My father lived a privileged childhood as an only child, coddled by a family convinced of his destined greatness. They provided every intellectual opportunity imaginable, and he became a polyglot, voracious reader, music lover, and connoisseur of life’s finer…

Read more

At Cactus, we’ve always had a cast of characters working for us. One that stands out in my memory was a woman who had spent decades in the apparel industry. She was older than the rest of us, and…

Read more

I grew up in simpler times, when our television choices were limited to the imaginatively named TV One and TV Two. Much of what aired was locally produced: smart, high-quality shows like Gliding On and Mastermind, alongside glossier fare…

Read more

I often, in my various board roles, use the saying about turkeys not voting for Christmas. Generally, I use the metaphor when talking about an organisation’s appetite, or otherwise, for making hard calls amidst the pressure from various stakeholder…

Read more

I wrote the other day about maintaining equanimity in the face of pretty horrible social media comments. That is, of course, made even more difficult when many of those comments utterly misrepresent one’s position on various issues. A case…

Read more

This weekend I found myself glued to the screen watching little dots move across the map of the French Alps. Those dots, for the uninitiated, were the elite runners at UTMB, the biggest ultramarathon event in the world. The…

Read more

There is a certain demographic who, by virtue of their age, heard numerous times in childhood the old rhyme: sticks and stones may break my bones, but names can never hurt me. It was a kind of verbal armour,…

Read more