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?

Here's a fact from the high arts of management theory: It's easier to scare the crap out of your team than it is to inspire them with an exciting vision of the future.

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:

Leadership has become a tricky issue in today's purpose-connected workforce. It's no longer just about the money, even beyond the Millennial set.

So how can leaders increase performance in a purpose-driven world?

If I gave you a cheque with a LOT of zeros on it, would you go to work on Monday?

This is a question I’ve asked groups all around the world. It’s a question that makes HR and team leaders flinch. But it shouldn’t. In fact, it’s a deeply revealing question about the primacy of work in our lives.

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.’

Meaning is very quickly becoming the most powerful driver of engagement, fulfilment and performance in the workplace.

The movement towards meaning has been bubbling away for some time, but it’s still pretty misunderstood. A few years ago a major report from the Career Advisory Board made a couple of eye-opening findings. When asked, managers felt the most important factor for millennials was securing a high-paying job. But when that question was asked to millennials themselves - money was secondary. For millennials, meaningful work was the single most important factor in defining a successful career.

Calls of housing crashes, banking busts and general gloom will be wrong again.

According to Havas Media’s Meaningful Brand index, consumers wouldn’t care if 75% of brands disappeared tomorrow. So, the real question is: is your brand one of the 75%, or the 25%?

The housing market has peaked with prices no longer growing. At the same time, auction clearance rates are lower and a solid pipeline of new supply – particularly apartments – will soon flood the market in a number of cities and regions.

The big question for business and individuals - how severe will the downturn be and what does it mean for the economy?

This report draws on over a decade of trend forecasting to highlight the top 20 trends that will shape the next decade. Whether these trends become an existential threat or an exciting opportunity for your business will largely depend on your perspective and preparedness.

The value of a strong workplace culture is no longer debated. It’s no surprise that the biggest brand on planet, Google, has also won Fortunes' Best Companies to Work For 6 years in a row. However, this begs two obvious questions a) what kind of culture should your place have, and b) how do you make it happen. Read on.