In the 18th Century, Scotland was a land without a leader. James VI of Scotland had become James I of England. The country was Crippled by debt and blighted by poverty. Scotland was a country without a parliament.

Yet out of this small country emerged a ferocious movement of innovative thinking; The Scottish Enlightenment.

Dennis C Rasmussen, the author of The Infidel and The Professor; charting the friendship of Adam Smith and David Hume, poses the question;

“How did a nation that began the eighteenth century as a poor, backward outpost on the fringe of Europe manage to become such…

When you hear the word myth, what do you think? An epic Homer text or a Euripides play? Do you think of a 10-hour Lord of The Rings trilogy? Something enormous and impenetrable. I find it daunting to think in terms of creating something that huge.

And fear aside, the Middle-Earth Blog by Michael Martinez reports that it took Tolkien 17 years to write Lord of The Rings. Who’s got that kind of time?

But fear not, mythology doesn’t reside only in epic fantasy or sci-fi books, and it’s not hidden in the formidable stories of the Greeks and Romans.

…

A monster sits upon the throne of India and Indochina; jilted and hateful he marries a new bride each night, only to execute them the next day. His rage goes unchecked. Silent anger grows across his kingdom, prayers for intervention from bereaving families, but no one comes forward to challenge him.

Until, young Shahrazad, daughter of the King’s executioner steps forward offering to marry the King with a bold plan to halt his fury and end the bloodshed.

The story of Shahrazad and the King is the framing story of One Thousand and One Nights, or Alf Laylah wa-laylah, the…

Once long ago, before freelancing, my team and I were three spoilt office workers on a well-paid and long lead project. But we moaned and groaned and feigned superiority, and then team member number four arrived, G.

He practically shook the carpeted ground underneath his feet with positivity and eagerness to please. No job was too small, no middle manager too unimportant for him to please, no reason to be pessimistic about anyone or anything.

And he didn’t mind our teasing.

He knew we wouldn’t bother teasing him if we didn’t like him but more importantly, he understood that the…

When Dorothy’s house gets whisked into the air in L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard Of Oz (1900) it leaves behind a scorched and lifeless landscape in Kansas. The dull repetition of colourlessness has infected the land and the hearts of those around her.

In the 1939 film version, Dorothy has a different problem. No-one is taking her seriously. No one cares about her fight with the influential Miss Gulch and the threat to her dog, Toto. Aunt Em, Uncle Henry and even the farmhands are too busy to lend her their ears for a couple of minutes.

Sound familiar? A…

The hustle, the noise, Dragons Den style panels ready to turf you out on the street for being so presumptuous as to call yourself a business.

The reigning narrative, often true, is that entrepreneurs and business owners should buckle up for sleepless nights and a torrent of agonising challenges.

Some may make you; most will sink you.

But not in Blue Oceans Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant by Renée Mauborgne and W. Chan Kim.

Written in 2005, Blue Ocean Strategy provides a set of tools and frameworks to reorientate organisations away from super…

Patagonia, the clothing company with a penchant for environmental activism, has found a way to scale upcycling into a profitable business model.

Upcycling is the process of re-purposing waste, like the billions of new clothes condemned to landfill into a product for use.

Landfill clothing has been on Patagonia’s hit list for years, and in 2019 they started ReCrafted, an experimental enterprise tasked with unearthing a scale-able product process for creating fashion garments out of discarded clothes.

Making clothes from new material can be done efficiently on a factory line; a design is created and then replicated quickly. However, using…

By now, most of us have digested the entire library of free Simon Sinek articles on purpose or read and applied Seth Godin’s advice to our suite of business offerings.

Depending on your turnover, you may have signed up for an SEO or data insights package to bring our customers closer to our orbit.

Now we’re all swimming in the same pond of certifications, tools, advice and recommendations, what are our differentiating features?

With technology at our fingertips more at our fingertips than ever, our greatest assets are as they have always been. …