In this episode of Doing the Opposite: Business Disruptors, Jeff Dewing speaks to Simon Alexander Ong. Simon is an international Keynote Speaker, Bestselling Author of Energize and Award Winning Life Coach. Through his coaching Simon helps leaders, entrepreneurs, organisations and celebrities to transcend perceived limitations and experience extraordinary transformations through the power of insight, perspective and energy management.

Simon shares his career journey, candidly explaining that he began by running someone else’s race. He started a career in finance as that felt like what society expected him to do. Alongside his job he discovered he had a natural passion for helping people in their day-to-day lives; a passion which ultimately led him to becoming a professional coach. His success led to TV work and the publication of his book. Simon reflects that ‘when you pursue the path that lights you up, that brings you joy you begin to open opportunities that weren't there before.’

Simon argues that energy management, not time management, is the key to productivity, and that there are four dimensions of energy: physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. Mental energy is about your mindset, emotional energy is about how you relate to yourself and others, and spiritual energy is about meaning and purpose. Simon explains that if you are energy rich, even if you are time poor, you are going to get far more done in those hours and days than others might in months or years. Energy gives you the momentum to be truly productive.

Simon discusses the impact of surrounding yourself with positive energy and inspiration: ‘the fastest way to make meaningful progress in any area of your life is literally to design an environment around you that makes it impossible not to succeed’. He goes on to describe how you can achieve this and enhance your workflow.

Simon shared the story of the Energise cocktail, created at the Connaught Hotel in Mayfair to compliment his book. You can see the cocktail being mixed here.

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In this episode of Doing the Opposite: Business Disruptors, Jeff Dewing speaks to Human Values Expert David Allison. David is focused on changing how we understand ourselves, the people around us, and those we hope to engage with in our work. As the founder of the Valuegraphics Project – the first global inventory of core human values – he has transformed human values into measurable data and created an entirely new type of human-centric insights.

To what extent does your business or organisation rely on profiling your customer based on demographics? Are demographics an effective way of grouping people, or are factors such as age, race, gender etc broadly irrelevant when it comes to spending choices? David Allison discusses the limitations of demographic targeting and the importance of understanding and leveraging values in business and personal life.

David shares his journey from working in an ad agency to founding the Valuegraphics Project, which profiles target audiences based on core human values. David emphasises that values are the driving force behind decision-making and that demographics are an ineffective way to understand people.

Data can be incredibly powerful when it comes to deciding upon values. Values drive our every day decision making – if your business is struggling with staff retention, for example, the data could help you understand why. It’s very likely that your organisation’s values are not closely aligned with those of the staff who are choosing to leave.

David also makes the case that an organisation can’t have values. “The conversation needs to be shifted away from pretending that this inanimate legal entity called a corporation can somehow have values. It can't”, David says. “It can have a set of behaviours that we all adhere to”.

David’s book ‘The Death of Demographics’ is available now.

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In this episode of Doing the Opposite: Business Disruptors, Jeff Dewing speaks to Matt Alder. Matt is a podcaster, author, speaker and consultant focusing on innovation and technology in HR and Talent Acquisition. He is the host of Recruiting Future, one of the world's most popular talent acquisition podcasts, and over the last 20 years has built a reputation as a global thought leader, working with employers to optimise their talent technology strategies.

Matt explains how he discovered his passion for recruitment, and how he strives to utilise new technologies to make the recruitment process better for everyone – both businesses and candidates.

Matt shares his wisdom and expertise on the subject of recruitment, talent acquisition and retention. How can businesses find and keep the best people in order to grow? Matt and Jeff discuss the bad practice in the recruitment industry, from scattergun approaches to repeatedly replacing a single candidate. Matt explains how have these practices have become prevalent and how is the industry changing.

Matt offers a new approach when it comes to approaching recruitment. Matt suggests you shouldn’t hire a candidate purely on the basis of their skills or past experience, but also their ability to learn. “The shelf life of some technical skills is very short. So, if you're employing someone for the long term, it's their ability to fit in the context of that business, but also their ability to learn new skills and then grow within that business.” Furthermore, Matt highlights the importance of hiring people whose values align with that of the company.

Matt gives examples of businesses who have taken revolutionary approaches to hiring. Timpsons, for example, hired people straight out of prison to give them an opportunity, whilst also filling positions in frontline retail which are notoriously hard to recruit for. It was a win-win, and studies have shown that people employed through an open-hiring program were at least as good as the people who went through a process filtering by skills or experience.

Matt and Jeff also discuss retention – how business can better retain talent. One key area here is giving staff autonomy and flexibility when it comes to completing their tasks. Matt explains that many concepts surrounding our perception of work – such as the five day week – are old concepts that no longer apply. “We need a new operating system for work because we're working off something that may not be relevant for the world we now live in.”

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