The election looms large and which ever side wins, they will be confronted with an economy growing below trend, low inflation and a global backdrop where conditions are weakening. 

Will the promises being made now need to be refined?

Scott Bales is a global leader in the cutting edge arena known as “The Digital Shift”, encompassing innovation, culture, design, technology and mobility in a world gone digital. A thought leader through and through, Scott thrives on the intersection between cultural and behavioural changes in the face of technology innovations. In this video Scott details five global factors that have influenced industry performance in 2019.

Lisa McInnes-Smith is in the top echelon of corporate speakers on shifting performance, has also been instrumental in the transformation of career development and relationships. She has presented to more than one million adults across twenty-two countries and authored seven bestselling books.

As the first presenter outside the USA to be inducted into the Speaker Hall of fame Lisa’s focus is inspiring leaders and creating tangible shifts in their people. Whether it be shifting attitudes, direction, behaviours or outcomes Lisa delivers results and truly understands the challenges in driving performance.

As we consider how to make our classroom and school system "future fit", one of the most important things we need to embrace as educators is a paradigm shift from focussing on content delivery to capability building.

We spend a lot of time obtaining a high performance mentality, high influence and a growth mindset. Lisa McInnes-Smith poses the question who motivates the motivators?

I love speaking to groups of people involved in education because education is so important, and there are so many opportunities to improve the way we do it. However, there is also frustration in the education sector because it’s so big and dependent on government funding, and change can often appear slow.

 Over a century ago, the great educationalist John Dewey remarked: “If we teach today’s students as we taught yesterday’s, we rob them of tomorrow.”

There is no change without behaviour change. Education has never been more important. In fact, it is hard to overstate just how critical it is to get education 'right', given the point at which we find ourselves.

What happens when you transplant the DNA of Silicon Valley into financial services firms?

It’s quite a big leap for a traditional HR division.

Leaders know that innovation is critical to business success. If you don’t innovate you die.

It’s easy to demand your team be more innovative, but much, much harder to lead the way.

Here’s a few simple steps that enables innovation to happen.

Attitude is the single most important internal tool you have to shape every aspect of your life.

To maximize the power of that tool, it needs to be sharp, you need to know exactly how to use it, and you need to practice with it to bring out its power.

Please begin by taking just a moment to answer this question: What is attitude?

You never hear job ads looking for people who can effect real change. Sure, there’s the ads seeking “ambitious go-getters”, or the old chestnut: “think outside the box”.

But that’s not really what they’re looking for.

The housing market has hit the wall.

After years of unrelenting strength, house prices are dropping. Not by much, at this stage, but the heat in the Sydney market in particular, has suddenly turned cold.

The fascinating and scary thing is that the price falls are increasingly widespread.

Property on the blockchain? Smart contracts and bitcoin-like management of decentralised property ownership is coming. And that's just the start.

Although consumer demand has driven the widespread adoption of online real estate listings, the mechanisms and processes of real estate have gone largely unchanged for decades - or longer.

That's all starting to change.

Even the best cyclists in the world need a team. A peloton is made up of competing riders who are nevertheless helping each other. Nothing happens in isolation and we can't perform at our best without others.

There is a delicious irony in business at the moment. Many businesses are trying to humanise themselves - but they are hell bent on doing it through robotics and artificial intelligence (AI). Within this environment we should instead being saying Hi to good old H.I. or human intelligence.

And within this specifically I mean creativity. The future of your workforce will lie in being able to apply creativity, imagination, and strategy - the things AI doesn't do so well. Creativity in particular is shaping up to be the new frontier of strategic competitive advantage.

So, here's what I know about how to make creativity happen.

Last November we performed with Pink on the American Music Awards. Pink is known for performing aerial stunts that are truly inimitable as she sings live, refusing to ever lip sync! On the AMAs, Pink did something unprecedented even for her. She performed 200 feet above the ground on suspended cables pushing off the side of the glass J.W. Marriott building in downtown LA! This created an effect of gravity defiance. It looked magical; it also looked scary as hell! It turns out that it was:

It's never just about the presents when we talk about "giving" at Christmas.

We all know innovation is important, and that the pace of change is now so rapid that if we keep doing things the same way we will soon get left behind. Often we have good intentions about innovation. We say to ourselves, ‘Yes! I will spend more time thinking about how to improve my business.’