Do you know what your company values are? Most people don't know. Or they can name one. Usually if I ask someone, they say things like "errrr.... equality..?....teamwork...?". You can immediately see the problem. These things are motherhood and apple pie - no one disagrees with them, but they're just so bland that they don't get you very far. They're perfectly good values or qualities, but so what? What changes as a result? How do they drive your behaviour as a leader or manager, or impact on the customer experience?

At my company, Think Productive, we have five values that we celebrate and hold dear. Our values are:

• Psychology Before Technology

• Practical and Playful

• Human, Not Superhero

• We Walk Our Talk

• Trust and Kindness are our Rocketfuel

Graham Allcott 0:05

This is Beyond Busy. The show where we talk productivity, work-life balance, defining happiness and success. All the big questions that relate to work and life and how we manage all of it. My name is Graham Allcott. I'm your host for the show. I'm the author of a book called How to be a Productivity Ninja and I'm the founder of Think Productive. So on this week's show, we're talking to Tameika Isaac Devine. She was the first African American female to be elected to her City Council in Columbia, South Carolina. She's also the mayor Pro Tem in Columbia, South Carolina. And she has you know, really been at the forefront of community leadership through some really difficult times in that state. So, we talked about the removal of the Confederate flag, the Charleston shootings, Black Lives Matter and just some really great perspectives on leadership. And how to make all of this stuff work, you know, family, her job as a as a elected official, her other job as an attorney, and you know all the various different demands that she has placed on a time and how she manages the whole thing together and does so just in such a just a really graceful way just to really integrity about her and really just enjoy the conversation. So let's get straight into it. This was recorded down the line just a few weeks ago. So here's my conversation with Tameika Isaac Devine.

Graham Allcott 0:04

This is Beyond Busy, the show where we talk about work, and all the questions that define how and where we do that work. We talk about productivity, work-life balance, how people define happiness and success, and much, much more. If you're new here, my name is Graham Allcott. I'm your host for the show. I'm the author of How to be a Productivity Ninja, and the founder of Think Productive. And this week on the show, we're talking to David Marquet. David is the author of the best selling book, Turn the Ship Around, has an amazing TED Talk with the same title, which we'll put a link to in the show notes. And he's also the author of new book Leadership is the Language. So we're gonna talk in a second to David, this is a pre lockdown conversation that we had earlier this year in London, when he was over here for a few days. So just get into it. Just to say, I hope you're enjoying the sunshine. It's a really lovely few days here in Brighton on the south coast of the UK. And also if you haven't been following me and my Rev Up for the Week, Sunday emails, you can find out more at GrahamAllcott.com were you'd be able to get details of how to sign up from there. And the Show Notes for this episode and all the others are at getbeyondbusy.com.

So let's get straight into the episode. This is a conversation about David's new book Leadership is Language, fascinating book about how language plays such a huge role in how we lead and in fact defines the style of how we lead so we talk a lot about that. We talked about his time as the captain of a nuclear submarine in the US Navy, and much much more. So I think you're gonna really enjoy David really just charismatic, inspiring, interesting guy with that. So many wise things to say so let's get straight to the episode. Here's my conversation with David Marquet.

've had a great reaction to the latest Beyond Busy podcast episode, with the highly passionate and compassionate David McQueen. I've known Dave a long time and he always brings his thoughtful A-game to everything he does. People really loved the little snippet of our conversation I put on my instagram where Dave talks about going in to Uber and doing a keynote where he starts by saying "let's face up to the truth: your boss is trash!".

I think the reason it resonated is that a lot of business culture is about hiding from the truth. In my travels through businesses I've seen some incredible cognitive dissonance over the years: Certain people getting an easier ride than others (or bad behaviour being ignored) because of their talent or status; brands that are clearly killing the planet high-fiving each other for saving it; impressive offices and meaningless awards hiding the fact that no-one there knows the answers either; people ignoring the notion that profitability is a driving force... There are countless examples where the truth is actively avoided.

Of course, truth is often hard to hear. No one likes to be the bearer of bad news, especially of personal bad news, like someone's poor performance, a change in direction, or conflict. That's where truth also needs kindness.

Graham Allcott 0:05

Hello again welcome back, Graham Allcott Beyond Busy The show where we talk productivity, work-life balance, happiness and success, life, the universe and everything, all that stuff. And on this episode, this is episode seven,we are talking to Amy Lee. Amy is a professional clown. So just to prove my, my devotion to be on busy after my recent illness, I'm sat in the shed on a Sunday afternoon. I really like I just don't work weekends like I'm very good at not allowing work to creep into my weekends. But I've had Roscoe our little boy or weekend we've been up at the SeaLife centre today running around and all that sort of stuff. And I've just got a couple of hours where he's with his mom, I'm down in the shed and I'm recording little voice bits for you. So here we are. This is Amy Lee. If you listen to the last episode with Matt From the songs and seven podcast, you'll probably already know that Matt is Amy's fiance, and that he proposed on his podcast on songs in seven. And you'll find a link to that in the show notes to the previous episode. And you know, it's just not often that you're sat in somebody's kitchen and you're having a cup of tea. So I was chatting to Matt and just kind of preparing for the interview with him. And then Amy piped up with the information that she is a professional clown. And I see some of this and we managed to arrange an interview. And it just felt like one of those amazing little things that just falls into your lap. From the very beginning of the idea of beyond busy as this podcast, I really wanted to interview people who had unique and interesting jobs and had kind of fun job titles and stuff like that, and I think to be seven episodes in and having already interviewed an internet musician, an Olympic gold medalist, an entrepreneur, a chief executive, it kind of feels like yeah, like I've I've ticked off some some good jobs. In these first few episodes, I sat down with Amy after my interview with Matt and Amy is Jasper from the clowning duo, Mauro and Jasper. And I'm sat here with Amy. And obviously the first question to ask is do you have a business card that says clown on it? So here's Amy.

Graham Allcott 0:05

Hello and Welcome to Beyond Busy The show where we talk productivity, work life balance and defining happiness and success. My name is Graham Allcott. I'm your host for the show. And in this episode, I'm talking to Charlie Davies. So before we get into the show, just a really quick reminder, there are some tickets available for my masterclass event in London. It is on Thursday, the 27th of February, and we're going to be at the business design Centre in his LinkedIn. It's a full day with me looking at all the core content from my book, How to be a productivity ninja and so if you want to start the new year, with more clarity and more control and really getting a good system in place, a good second brain to remember all the stuff that you need to be working on. And just some really good productivity habits then we're only just in the new year. It's February. 27th of the businesses I intend to in is in turn, you can get tickets at Eventbrite. So if you just go into the Eventbrite app, and just put in Graham Allcott productivity masterclass, you will find the event in there, a few more tickets left. So we'd love to see you for a full day, really revamping your productivity systems and bringing you up to productivity Ninja blackbelt standard. So if you're up for that, go to Eventbrite and find out more. And we'll put the link to that as well in the show notes, which is at get beyond busy.com. So let's get into this episode. Charlie does some really interesting work around helping people to get clarity around what they're working on to really test and scrutinise your ideas and really help you to get that level of focus and drive in what you're doing. I just think his works really fascinating. Love the way he thinks, and we're doing this one down the line, so Let's get straight into it. Here's my conversation with Charlie Davies. I am here with Charlie How you doing?

Graham Allcott 0:04

Hello, my name is Graham Allcott. Welcome to another episode of Beyond Busy. The show where we talk productivity, work life balance, defining happiness and success and much much more. On this episode, I'm talking to Dave McQueen, coach, contrarian, all around interesting guy and I think you're gonna really love this episode. We talk about Black Lives Matter, we talk leadership, we talk successes and failures in business, we talk telling hard truths to organisations and loads more. Just so much to take away from this episode. So I think you're gonna really enjoy it. Quick before we get into it, so I have just started up this mailing list in the last few weeks. I'm on week 10. And if you go to GrahamAllcott.com you can sign up there. We're now over 500 people it's it's been a really interesting journey of the last few weeks, just having the deadline every week to write something useful and positive. So it is called Rev up for the Week. And the idea is it's like one positive thought to take into the week ahead goes out every Sunday. If you want to sign up GrahamAllcott.com and you'll find the little form to fill in right on that page. And if you haven't yet subscribed to Beyond Busy, I'd love you to subscribe and also just to let you know that you can get shownotes previous episodes lots more at getbeyondbusy.com so just go to getbeyondbusy.com and let me know what you think if you want to drop me a line as well Graham (at) thinkproductive.co.uk. All right, let's get into this episode recorded in lockdown. I've got this list of there's probably about 15 people on the list who pretty much since I started Beyond Busy I've really wanted to have on and just for some reason haven't got around to tapping them up for episodes. They're generally people in my network, that I sort of know. Dave was on that list and we connected. So reconnected recently really over the video that Dave did, centering Black Lives, which we're going to talk about in this episode, which I just really loved and shared on my mailing list and elsewhere. So let's get straight into the episode recording lockdown. Here's myself and David McQueen.

Do you ever wonder what it would be like to have a few more hours of feeling fully alert and on form each week? A few years ago, I was following all of my Productivity Ninja rules (of course!) but still finding I was less productive later in the day because I just had less energy. The familiar 4pm slump. I started working with a nutritionist I'd met, Colette Heneghan, to change all this. It worked and I'm still feeling the benefits several years later.

This weekend I've left my hometown of Brighton for the first time since... well, you know when. I'm writing this on a train (an actual train! Imagine!).

There are signs that things in the UK are (rightly or wrongly) beginning to open up. I can't say I'll be at the front of any queue for retail therapy, haircuts or a pint (I do all of these things from home, anyway!) but perhaps it's time to put some markers down. To get out of survival and existence mode and back towards some flourishing and forwards-momentum.

Graham Allcott 0:05

Hello, welcome to another episode of beyond busy, the show where we talk productivity, work life balance, and defining happiness and success. My name is Graham Allcott - I'm your host for the show. On this episode, it's me it's me talking to Lawrence and Carlos, from the Happy Startup School. Really fun conversation to have. They're so thoughtful and grounded as people that I think they just bring the best out in their guests by just bringing a really nice energy to things. So yeah, really loved it really had a great time on there. And yeah, I think we had just over 100 people tuning in live to it. And we thought we'd just put it out as a podcast as well because it just, you know, seemed like a really good conversation to have right now. So just before we get into it, just to say hope you're well, the whole conversation really is all about productivity in a pandemic. And it talks a lot about some of the work life balance and definitions of success. You know, viewpoints within that, too. So it's very much on brand Beyond Busy this whole conversation. But it's really, you know, steeped in this weird, fuzzy, middle ground that we now find ourselves in. So, you know, lockdown rules are clear, everyone knows what they're doing. Everyone knows what they're not allowed to do. And in some ways, I find this current environment just like even more confusing, because it just feels like what we're allowed to do, again? What's one of the rules so if you're struggling with that, just know you're not alone. And it's at least some tentative steps towards, you know, some kind of economic normality that we might be returning to who knows. Just Taking it a day, a week and, you know, baby steps, time at the moment. So that's just the sort of nature of things but hope you are well hope you're surviving Hope everyone you know is, is okay too. A couple of quick things before we go into the episode. Firstly, just to say if you're listening to this because you are a regular, longtime Beyond Busy listener, and you don't know about my mailing list, then I have been setting up this mailing list over the last five, six weeks. It's called Rev up for the Week. And the idea is just to put some positive ideas in your inbox every Sunday night and just review up for the week. Are you ready for the week ahead? So if you're not signed up, just go to GrahamAllcott.com and on the homepage there you'll see a little form. In fact, I think it's pretty much at the bottom of every page on the site. So just fill in and that'll add you on to the mailing list. And then you'll get my Rev up for the Week emails. And also just to say that this episode is sponsored by Think Productive. So that's my company. And we run productivity workshops, both face to face in normal times, and also completely 100% virtually too. So if you're interested in that we have offices in the UK, in North America, Western Europe, based at the Netherlands and Australia, New Zealand. So if you are in or somewhere near one of those countries around the world, then had to thinkproductive.com, and find out more about how our stuff can really help. We've got a couple of really specific COVID workshops, we've got one called the Productivity Minjas Guide to Working from Home. We have one called Leading Remote Teams, which has actually been our probably most popular one over the last month or so where people are really starting to get their head around, what's the longer term remote working environment and look like and also one called supercharge your virtual meeting. So if any of that interests you along with, of course, how to be a Productivity Ninja, get your inbox zero all that other stuff that we do, then head to thinkproductive.com and we would love to help you out. Let's get into this episode. So this is we're using crowdcast for this, which is not a software that I've used before but it works really well. It's a Friday lunchtime, and I think you're gonna really enjoy this conversation. So let's jump straight in is myself with Laurence and Carlos from Happy Startup School.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of Beyond Busy, the show where we talk productivity, work life balance, and how people define happiness and success. My name is Graham Allcott. I'm your host for the show. And on this episode, I'm talking to Lucy Clayton and Steve Haines. They are the authors of a book called How To Go To Work, the honest advice no one ever tells you at the start of your career. So before we get into that, a couple of things I want to talk about. The first is Black Lives Matter. So if you are not yet on my mailing list, if you go to GrahamAllcott.com you can sign up there each week. I'm basically sending out this thing called Rev up for the week, and it's basically one positive or interesting idea to just help get you set for the week ahead. So it comes out on a Sunday evening. If you want, you can read it Monday morning on your commute, remember those. And the idea is just kind of share something usually productivity or kind of leadership he related. But yeah, a couple of weeks ago, I did a thing on Black Lives Matter on there. And I want to just kind of share a couple of responses to it. So the first thing is, I was quite prepared to get quite a big percentage of unsubscribes because it's kind of seen as like a political thing. And, you know, as someone who just talks about productivity, should I really be dabbling in politics and whatever? Those of you who know me well will know that, you know, that really stops me used to be very gobby on Twitter and decided to pack that in. And guess what, zero unsubscribes like zero, and also just some really nice messages back with people saying it helped them to articulate their own thoughts on it, and People just, you know, really recognising for the first time where they might have had some biases or weren't aware of certain things. So that was really great. And I just wanted to I guess I just wanted to say that it it's really struck me over the last week that hang on, like this change is really happening this time. I'm someone who gets quite cynical about these things. I, you know, I find I found the whole black tile, social media thing, that blackout Tuesday thing, just really problematic. It's like, do we have to turn something that's really serious into this kind of shallow participators social media thing? You know, and really, the real work is what goes on in real life in real conversations and, you know, challenging policies in your workplace, thinking about your own biases, thinking about, you know, your own decisions or treatment of people or whatever, you know, and I think is for the same reason I'm really anti stuff like children in need and quite relief and telephones in general all that stuff because it feels to me like it puts in a neat Tupperware box the idea that people need to care. So people do they're like, you know, they do their sponsored event or whatever, one, you know, watch children need one Friday every year, and then it kind of feels like for the rest of the time, oh, well, that's taken care of I did my bit. And, you know, I get that sometimes in life, we need ceremony and stuff. But I think it's more interesting just how we behave and the choices that we make just all the rest of the time when there isn't a spotlight on us. And when we're not seemingly all under pressure to walk out of the kind of virtual houses outside of our house and deliver the kind of virtual on the steps of 10 Downing Street statements to our virtual audience. You know, I just find this really bizarre that it's like every brand and every person needs to come out and kind of make a video kind of serious personal statement, you know, that basically is cut like, cut and pasted from everyday everybody else's statements. I just don't think that is the best way to make change. But I think the last week or so, there's been a couple of things where I've really thought Ah, hang on this is this is happening this is great. One was the the toppling of the statue of Colston into the into the harbour in Bristol. That just felt like a really historic moment. I love the fact that the I think was the mayor of Bristol said this happening this throwing the statue into the sea. This is now part of part of its history. Right and I just think that's just just so amazing to witness that. The other one was cycling down to the seafront last Saturday, with my son Roscoe on the back of the bike expecting to see about 1000 people for a demonstration that was happening in Brighton for Black Lives Matter And I don't know how many people were there 10,000 15,000 something like that. It was huge. And you know, Brighton can be Britain's very white place but it can be a very politicised you know, open to politics kind of place. And just to see, just the sheer volume of people there just made me think, Wow, this this feels different and that's really promising. So, I guess, you know, the reason for saying this is my, my cynicism for blackout Tuesday and putting up a black tile on social media is that you know, we need to prolong the conversation and it needs to keep going. And it Brittany's to keep going longer than most people are. Like, willing to do it before they get tired, right? Like we kind of have to get tired of this sprint to actually start to make a difference. So So I guess the main point of this is to say let's keep this conversation going even more longer than it feels comfortable to and then we might be on with a shot so it's probably saying it's a really interesting time and yeah really promising to to see what what might come next. So if you want to check out the blog by the way that I did that was part of the rabbit for the week about Black Lives Matter we put that on my blog, So we'll put a link to that in the show notes. getbeyondbusy.com, we'll put links to everything in there as per usual go check that out. Also lovely to see that Aston Villa have resumed action lovely also to see both teams doing the Get down on one knee thing. Just as the game kicked off it just the the choreography of that and the moment of that was just something to behold so you know, really good to see really exciting and, you know, in a weird way exciting to see a really boring nil nil draw, because that's obviously inevitably what the villa game tended to and it's like the spotlights on us to be like the first Premier League game back. It had to be awful, didn't it? But, you know, wouldn't be there if it wasn't awful. So yeah, hey, so speaking about getting back to some level of normality. So this episode is with Lucy Clayton and Steve Haines. It was recorded just before locked down at the offices of penguin on the strand in London, and I'm offering this one up now as a little bubble of normality. So we talk in here about loads of really, just really well observed little things that happen in offices and organisations. The book is basically a career guide for people at the start of their career. And it's like the manual of how to go to work and what to do in jobs and how to deal with office politics and all that sort of stuff. So, as you can imagine, I pick out a lot of the more sort of nitty gritty slightly to boot Kind of subjects about office life work life. So if you're pining for the office a little bit pining for normality, a little bit pining to get on the train or in the car on the tube, go to a desk, meet with your colleagues and all that kind of stuff, then I hope this is a nice bubble of normality little escape. And let's get into it. This is Lucy Clayton, Steve Haines and me in the offices of penguin in London, just before lockdown. Let's do it. I'm here at penguin. I'm with Lucy Clayton, Steve Haines. Hello, hello. So you've just written this book, which we're going to talk about a bit later, but it's about you guys first. Okay. The book is how to go to work. Yeah. So I just wanted to start with, let's just paint the picture of the work that you guys do yourselves before we get into the book itself.

In Part One, I explained my reasons for designing my current work schedule, based around the concept of 3 C’s: Create, Collaborate and Chill.

I’ve been keeping this schedule pretty constantly for a couple of months now, so in this post I’m going to go into each phase in more detail and give some reflections on how productive it’s been so far. First, here’s a visual reminder of how it works for me:

Returning to work after a long absence is an interesting experience. In discussing it with friends, I’ve often heard stories of women returning to work after having a baby feeling much less confident before, and in my own sabbatical period, I certainly noticed my own confidence ebb away in the absence of the daily drip-feed of tiny wins.

Having seen that my company not only survives but actually grows when I’m not there, my need to return isn’t necessarily a financial one (although “more money” and growth are on my priority list!) and having spent a lot of time in recent years working from home and not part of a team in an office, my return was perhaps unusual in that I had significant control over my own destiny in terms of daily and weekly routines. So it’s been a kind of blank canvas. Most of us have some degree of control or autonomy over how we set up our working lives, but the power within us to actually use it often gets lost in the day-to-day.

Graham Allcott 0:05 Hello, and welcome to another episode of Beyond Busy. The show where we talk productivity, work life balance and defining happiness and success. My name is Graham Allcott. I'm your host for the show. And on this episode, I'm talking to Laurence and Carlos, the founders of the Happy Startup School. So welcome to 2018 - hope is treating you well. I've been back in the groove for like a week and a half. And I'm now going away. I'm going to go for a couple of weeks to get my annual kind of winter, vitamin D and sun fix and scheming and planning kind of fix and all of that. So taking about massive stack of books, massive stack of paperwork, and I'm just going to be asking the sea on a few things. It's just always what I do at this time of year is sometime in the winter, try and ask to see what I want for the year ahead. And the sea always knows the answers. So yeah, I hope that doesn't sound too hippy, but that's that's how it rolls for me. This episode is long as and Carlos really love this one, this was probably certainly one of my favourite conversations to have. And we get into so many different topics here. So we talk about their role as founders, how they work together, some of their views on stuff like networking, and building community. And a really interesting conversation about the whole notion of lifestyle businesses and whether lifestyle businesses are a good thing or a bad thing and some of the sort of negative connotations with a lot of the stuff that goes on in the kind of an entrepreneur business space. So really, really interesting two guys who I think have totally, certainly got well mapped out views on work life balance and happiness and what makes that stuff tick and just have a really good orientation around their lives of like, what they what they want to achieve and how they set about doing that. So really brilliant. conversation to guys who are very present very open and really inspiring. So I'm really hoping you're gonna get loads from this because I really love doing it and so much so that I'm actually going to be taking part in their Altitude's full week immersion thing in June of this year. So really looking forward to spending a lot more time with them as well. So let's get into it. So here's lots of cars we are in platform nine which is a new co working space in Brighton very fancy and also coincidently where think productive my business are moving to in March, April time. This year, we're actually ditching our, we have our own space at the moment in home, and we're ditching that to be in the co-working vibe and have shared office desks and all that stuff. So I say we, I'm never there like I'm at home in my shed, being a hermit but like the rest of the team will be there and that's where I'll end up going for meetings and stuff like that. So looking forward to that. So we're in platform nine, we're in the Brighton platform nine as opposed The whole one on in a nice kind of, sort of canopy read sort of meeting table kind of space. But there is a bit of background noise at times here. There's like a few people walking past and stuff like that. But hopefully that just kind of adds to the kind of CO working atmosphere that you hear in the background. So let's get into it. Here's Lawrence and Carlos from the happy startup school. Right so we're here at platform nine. I'm with Lawrence and Carlos, the founders of the Happy Start Up Schoo school, how you doing?

One of the things about pandemics is that whilst we're all weathering the same storm, our boats are different shapes and sizes.

We're certainly not "all in the same boat". For some people, the answer to "How's lockdown treating you" is sunny and straightforward: "I'm sitting in my garden on furlough, learning crochet/violin/philosophy/delete as appropriate for the level of smugness of your friend" while for others, the answer is more like "arrrrgggghhhhhhhh".

I've found myself in that latter category. It's tough.