Human Resources - Next Evolution Performance

Vanessa Bennett1 October 2026

Reward and recognition: How to lift profitability without handing out trophies for breathing

Confession time. I didn’t get participation awards at school. Not because I was too cool for them — they just weren’t really a thing. You either won, or got great marks, or you didn’t. That was it. Somewhere in there I picked up a fairly healthy dose of wanting to do great work without needing […]

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Alex Davids11 September 2026

Curiosity in the Age of AI

At home I’m surrounded by three very different stages of curiosity. My children are eight, eleven and fourteen, and the questions that come from them every day are endless. Some are wonderfully simple, others surprisingly philosophical, and many arrive at moments when I least expect them. Why do some people believe different things about the […]

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Vanessa Bennett4 September 2026

Increasing capacity: the free extra people hiding in your headcount

I must confess, Claude and I have been deepening our relationship ever since he hit the market. I lean on him most days, and yes, he’s saving me hours every week. So this isn’t an anti-tech-stack article. Far from it. But when I sit across the table from a new prospective client on a performance […]

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Alex Davids25 August 2026

Don’t Have Time for Investing in High Performance Right Now?

I was sitting with the founder of a fast-growing tech company not long ago when he said something that made me smile. “We’d love to invest in leadership and performance work,” he said, leaning back in his chair, “but right now we just need to focus on building the product.” I hear this a lot. […]

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Perpetua Neo25 August 2026

Surrogate Male Trap Part II

Precision Voice, Standards, Ownership (the conversion moves) See Part I here Part I named the trap: surrogate-male success is often sum-zero—public wins, private compound interest. Part II is the conversion: how to turn the same field conditions into dividends—more authority, cleaner peace, and higher performance without self-erasure. You already have the three levers: Precision Voice […]

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Vanessa Bennett6 August 2026

Stop trying to fix your people’s mindset – until you’ve done this…

It’s one of the most common requests we get. A senior leader – sometimes a CEO, sometimes a head of a division – gets in touch and says something along the lines of: “We’ve been through a lot of change. The pace isn’t slowing down. There’s some negativity creeping in. We’d love to do a […]

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Alex Davids9 July 2026

Where to begin? When and how do we change?

“Where is your energy right now on a scale from 1 to 10?” A question I’ve asked clients a hundred times. Recently one gave me, not an uncommon answer but, an interesting one. He paused for a moment and then laughed slightly before saying, “I have absolutely no idea.” What surprises me is how often […]

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Vanessa Bennett8 July 2026

The one Key Performance Indicator (KPI) your business is missing… And it’s costing you dearly

When you’re reviewing your leadership team’s performance, what metrics are on the table? Revenue. Margin. Pipeline. Retention. Possibly NPS or engagement scores. All important. All necessary. But here’s what’s almost certainly not on that list: whether the people driving those desired KPIs results are actually going to be able to sustain doing so. Whether the […]

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Vanessa Bennett6 June 2026

You’re Paying Knowledge Workers for Their Knowledge. So Why Is Your Culture Sabotaging It?

One of my clients – a senior leader in people and culture at a large law firm – said something recently that stopped me in my tracks. We were talking about the culture of law firms and she looked at me and said: “When you think about it, everything we sell – our advice, our […]

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Alex Davids29 May 2026

Cross cultural high performance

A Neuroscience Lens on Culture, Communication, and Psychological Safety As more businesses expand globally, the technical challenges of growth are often easier to solve than the human ones. Writing from New Zealand, I see that New Zealand companies, in particular, are highly entrepreneurial. They move quickly, build strong product, and expand into global markets with […]

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