The short version...

At this stage 'us' is largely 'me' - Nigel George.

I'm nobody special - I have been a contract manager for many years, and have lived and breathed technology and IT for most of my life. I have managed businesses in electronics, IT, manufacturing and construction, and diverse businesses from small enterprises to 200+ employees and NGO's. I have a business degree, an environmental management masters degree and a few management systems auditing certificates if you are impressed by such things.

What I am good at, is managing change within businesses.

I have learnt how to see to the heart of business issues and help managers build structure and improve efficiency. I can communicate as easily to technical people as I can to executives and boards. I also have a reputation for being very direct and willing to tackle difficult business issues.

The environment matters a lot to me. Not in any idealistic way, but I grew up in a tiny coastal town and have watched it destroyed by over-fishing and over-development. I look at the mess around me and wonder what my seven year old is going to see when he is my age.

So Redskink is my contribution to changing things.

I genuinely believe developing ways to minimise our impact on the environment is a golden opportunity for most businesses, not a threat to our livelihood.

There are exciting times ahead and I look forward to working with anyone who sees the opportunity as I do.

Cheers,
Nigel George

The long version...

Whether you support it, live with it, don't care or utterly despise it, no rational person can deny that we live in a world that is largely driven by commerce.

At the heart of our capitalist driven economies is us - business.

Without business there would be no employment. There would no taxes to pay the salaries of politicians or to invest in public infrastructure. There would be little international trade and the technical advances of the last 200 years would not have been possible without the entrepreneurs, dreamers and idealists pushing their businesses and industry as a whole forward.

The one big chink in the armour of the mighty machine of commerce is something that lies at the heart of all our motivations - self interest. This not only applies to individuals, but business and society as a whole.

Originally necessary for survival, self interest is a part of the way we are. It is not bad or wrong in any practical way, but we have got carried away.

We have forgotten how to be frugal. We have forgotten the sacrifices that used to be made just to survive. Innovation and individual restraint has been supplanted by mass culture and economic bloat.

We have got complacent, lazy and would rather waste our precious financial, natural and social resources than make the effort to change.

For a long time, we as businesses have been accused of being amoral at best - if we can legally get away with it, we will do it.

But the times are changing.

The years of over-consumption are starting to show. The signs of what is to come are worrying and we wonder what we are leaving for our kids.

Many of use Gen-X'ers are taking over where our Boomer parents have moved on. We are often accused of being a generation of cynics, but there is also a good streak of pragmatism in us.

Airy-fairy-left-wing-greenie thinking isn't going to feed your staff at the end of the week.

We are swamped with information, but starved for direction. We gave up on our politicians long ago and are very wary of over-marketed management fads and technological "miracles" that promise everything and deliver nothing.

Business is at the pointy end of the need for change, but it is often difficult to know where to start. When we are honest with ourselves many of us can admit that we succeed in spite of ourselves, but it is getting harder to stand back and make strategic decisions as the pace of change leaves many of us permanently in reactive mode.

Making changes in our businesses in many ways is like starting a diet and subsequently succeeding at losing weight. We need:

• Structure - a framework that maximises our chances of success.
• Direction - without an end in mind, there is little point starting.
• Support - no business operates in a vacuum and the support of our employees, suppliers, customers and community are integral in maintaining a "healthy" business.

Redskink does not pretend to have all the answers, each business is individual and, to continue the analogy with a personal diet, this is the reason why there are so many diet (business) programs out there. We do not offer any off the shelf software, we are not tied to any single hardware vendor or service supplier.

We are here to assist fellow businesses build structures and establish a strategic direction that is suited to their individual styles and methods of operation.

I would like to hand the reins over to my sons one day and be able to say;

"boy's this is our business - it may not be the biggest, or the most successful. We didn't always make the right decisions and we weren't able help everyone. But we did exist in a time that businesses all over realised that the buck stopped with us. And in the end, together, we made a difference."

Cheers,
Nigel George
June 2008