MDE 26: David Lale of Charity People and Career Volunteer - helping people use their skills to do good.
The entrepreneurs I interview here all have a mission and David Lale is no exception. I only wish I had known about his company when I left recruitment myself! David set up Charity People in the 1990s, after harbouring “ambitions to save the world”. He’d wanted to go into the church but they didn’t feel he was ready and because he was working in recruitment, he looked at other ways to make a difference. He was on honeymoon when the idea came for Charity People: “All good ideas come when…
MDE 25: Mark Heiman of Lur Apparel. Beautiful clothes, beautifully made.
It’s fair to say that, as an entrepreneur Mark Heiman has known bad times as well as good. His first venture after graduating from Oregon State University with a degree in forestry was selling standing timber to local saw mills. But the economic downturn and rocketing interest rates of the early 1990s meant that industry all but shut down overnight. But like all successful entrepreneurs, Mark was quickly back on his feet, eventually taking the reins of his family’s textile business. “My…
MDE 24: Peter Bregman - Four Seconds to change your life
Those goals you’ve written for yourself? Screw them up and don’t bother, says Peter Bregman. Well, not quite, but he does think that goal setting can harm your performance. The author of Four Seconds, which is published this month, says that when we feel overwhelmed and stressed by our growing to-do list, our knee-jerk reaction is to work longer hours and pack more into the hours we are already working. He says in the book, “We multitask, dash from meeting to meeting, sneak emails under…
MDE 23: Murray Grainger - bringing integrity to businesses across the globe
Ethics and compliance programmes are fairly new in the corporate landscape and Murray Grainger thinks, still thinly staffed: “Lots of people don’t know they exist. You have to use innovative ways of getting people to know you’re there.” But awareness is increasing and there are industry-wide initiatives and drives towards best practice. In Spain, where Murray bases himself, all companies are now required to have a compliance officer making them responsible and liable for failing to…