English: Formula Ford Championship (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I have become a regular guest blogger on Dr Alf’s blog, and thought it would be helpful to introduce myself, explain my motivation and clarify why being a guest blogger matters to me.
Since the age of seventeen, I have always been curious about how the world works, why events unfold as they do and in different cultures.
In that ongoing process of discovery, I have become interested in geopolitics, progress, human and economic potential, climate change, politics and the power of ordinary people to do extraordinary things.
I own circa three books, read avidly, and follow 100+ different websites regularly, and travel widely in order to remain current and gain insight.
Having spent several years living and working in America, I entered the insurance industry, studied Business Administration and Economics, taught myself to speed-read and developed a career within several insurance multinationals in marketing and sales.
On my return to the UK in 1983, I entered the leasing business, within what is now a GE subsidiary and was subsequently headhunted into Burton Group Financial Services, which was then acquired by GE Capital.
With various roles including sales direction, I latterly became a troubleshooter and transformation specialist, engaging in pre-acquisition due diligence for the Executive Committee of the Group Board, and then putting these acquisitions onto an even keel before being parachuted into the next highly charged situation.
During my life, I have metamorphosed from being someone who thought that everything could be explained logically to someone who realizes that there is a great deal that cannot be explained very easily at all.
A total of fifteen events occurred in which I was extracted from the jaws of death, in situations where logically I should not have walked away nor be writing this piece.
The first four of these events, including a 140 mph spin in a Formula Ford at Brands Club Racing Circuit Hatch in Kent, UK, which nearly decapitated me, I put down to “just one of those things” and statistically very easy to explain.
By the eleventh incident, I was happy to explain things away by treating it as co-incidence and “luck” but by incident fifteen, which involved staring down the barrel of a pump-action shotgun, held by a policyholder that thought I was a gangland assassin sent to murder him in Venice, Florida, I felt that I was being looked after, since I am not a military man and have not been trained to operate when faced with deadly force.
This didn’t mean that I, as a practical man, thought this was forever, nor that it was cost-free (there is a price to be paid for everything), although it did and still does give me a feeling of temporary invulnerability.
Today, I continue to work as an interim manager/strategic consultant, and have become something of an expert on off-shoring, outsourcing and transformation of public and private sector organisations, working with people like IBM Global Services on the biggest local authority transformation ever done within the UK.
Working now with a mixture of clients, including foreign governments, quangos, start-ups, I work internationally, and over the years have helped raise £350 million gbp for new start-ups and commercialize a mobile flood barrier with military, commercial and renewable energy applications by finding a European partner.
In doing this work, my insurance background and training helps me understand quantifiable risks and by studying military history and concepts like Wisdom Warfare, Hoshin Planning, The Book of Five Rings, Clauswitz, Sun Tzu and others I develop future-proofed models and new adaptive analytic frameworks to find answers to problems.
Redundancy in the Political Process
I am of the view that Western politicians are in many instances not up to the job, and that those giving them their instructions are underestimating the transfer of wealth and power eastwards, having failed to develop cogent solutions to tackle our overall lack of competitiveness and leverage.
If by blogging as one of Dr Alf’s guest bloggers, I can shed more light on some of these pressing issues, then in my own small way, I can create a ripple effect that changes things for the better, by laying out facts and figures, and communicating directly and without spin those things which are in the public domain or can be discovered by careful analysis.
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