Forever Skills

APPENDIX CTen years of work and research

One of the great privileges of the work we have done over the past decade, and even across the past 30 years if we’re honest, is that we get the opportunity to work with different industries and professionals in different parts of the world almost every day of the year. In fact, there is scarcely an industry we haven’t worked with.

The great advantage of having such a rich and diverse professional history is that we are privy to the macro trends that run across all industries, not just one small part of the professional world.

It has also allowed us to ask a huge cross-section of the global community the kinds of questions few get the opportunity to, and exposed us to the kind of in-confidence strategic information that, to be frank, should make it illegal for us to be able to trade in the stock market.

The nature of the work we now do, as corporate speakers and organisational trainers, also means we have the access and means to ask questions of hundreds and even thousands of people in different industries in a single moment and then collect the answers via digital technology such as live polling. This gives us access to huge sample sizes without having to make annoying cold calls and interrupt people’s dinner time.

This means the very nature of our work is research-based, which gives us multiple methodologies through which we can find the truth that sits across categories, within industries as a whole and in the individuals who populate ...