Recently things have started going well for my business. 🥳 Well enough for me to finally create a LinkedIn company page.

Sometimes uncertainty can feel overwhelming and become debilitating. One year ago I decided to start my own business.

Do your energy levels vary throughout the day? About a year ago I started organising my work based on regular patterns I observed in my energy levels. I can’t remember where I heard about this idea, b...

Sometimes being a middle manager is a pain in the butt. I remember one situation in particular many, many years ago.

This week I finished a project that would have taken me 25 years to complete if I didn’t know how to code. The project involved identifying and classifying objects in images extracted from video recor...

Last year I decided to start my own company. At the time it wasn’t completely clear to me what the company would do.

A couple of days ago I encountered a mysterious behaviour when writing data to an external hard drive. A compute job expected to produce less than 0.

It was the middle of the 1990s and pharmaceutical companies were merging left, right, and centre. My dad had just found out that the headquarters of the department he was heading up was relocating to ...

In a previous post I wrote about the benefits of putting expectations into writing. That post was concerned with high-level fundamentals of how the team should operate.

When I was first put in charge of a team I ran into several surreal situations that I could not make sense of. For example, some people seemed incapable of asking for help.

Whilst working at the John Innes Centre I was involved in many bioimage analysis projects. My work involved talking to biologists and creating Python scripts to analyse their image data.

Getting feedback is an amazing way to learn. In fact, without feedback it is very difficult to learn at all.

Collaboration is a process that allows us to achieve more than we could on our own — that’s pretty awesome! The textbook answer for creating a successful collaboration is to have a shared goal, clearl...

At the beginning of my scientific career I had great admiration for the professors and researchers above me. However, whilst I was busy looking up in admiration I failed to notice all the core machine...

My heart sank. I was in a leadership meeting and I was being told my team would have to switch focus again.

The lack of air in the room was making me lethargic. I grasped my coffee cup, but it was empty, as was the plate of biscuits on the table.

Global warming is a cause for concern and is predicted to diversely affect agricultural systems. One aspect of the predicted effects is the susceptibility of pests to chemical pesticides. It is there....

I was exhausted, it had been non-stop all day. However, if you asked me what I had accomplished I couldn’t answer you.

Almost 40 years ago my parents took me to Legoland in Denmark. I was obsessed with Lego, and the experience exceeded my expectations.

Have you ever felt good about completing a complex task — only to find yourself waking up in the middle of the night realising that you forgot a crucial detail? $#!+! I can't believe I forgot about th...

The other day I was ranting to my wife about something that had upset me at work. She politely listened.

In the late 1960s Albert Mehrabian showed that words only account for a small fraction of communication. That tone of voice and body language have a greater impact than the actual words used.

Building a high-performing team requires you, as a leader, to help the individuals within your team learn and grow. However, you soon realise that what has worked well for you does not necessarily wor...

Have you ever been in a situation where you felt like you were in competition with a colleague or a neighboring team? Even though you were meant to be working towards the same goal! What is up with th...

BBSRC has unveiled a bold vision to harness the power of bioscience with the launch of its updated Forward Look for UK bioscience.

The other day my wife told me: "You value your friends' advice more than mine". My monkey brain immediately rejected the idea, and started racing for counter arguments to show that it was not true.

What does it take to build a high-performing team? What activities can you take as a leader to help your team outperform expectations and deliver superior business value? Here are three activities tha...

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? There are layers to this philosophical question. Does something exist without being perceived by consciousness? Can o...

Being an Expert Generalist should be treated as a first-class skill, one that can be assessed and taught.

It was dark in the room, I was sweating and felt nauseous. The other researchers in the seminar room seemed to be enjoying themselves.

Why should you care about management styles if you are not a manager? Importantly, your boss’ management style has a direct impact on your day-to-day life. Developing a basic appreciation of managemen...

ALT: a cat is sitting in front of a laptop computer asking for advice