With half the year already over and my blog updates being a little irregular lately I thought I would give a bit of an update as to the goings-ons of late.

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Well, just when the start of my year couldn't get any busier, semester one of my university study kicks in.

This year I am however rather excited as I will be studying some interesting topics including Social Media Networks for Business and having worked in companies and implemented some Social Media strategies before it will be interesting as to the approach taken by our lecturer and how the theory stacks up to the real world.

Part of the assessment is to keep a blog of your thoughts and reflection on the topics of social media that we study so I will be posting regularly here with my progress and hopefully some interesting and useful information that you could pick up and practically implement yourself.

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A couple of weekends ago I made a trip to Christchurch to attend a full day intensive Iaido training day a the Canterbury Kendo Club. We spent the first half of the day teaching all the Kendo students a little Iaido as many of them have never tried (and have usually seen us Iai people practicing our strange moves lol). It was a really good experience to teach, rather than learn or practice, it really tests how much you really know about the art you are practicing.  I taught the first kata of the Seitei set, Ipponme Mae, a very important one as it is always the first one you learn when starting out in Iaido. Sensei Eynon Philips has always told me that knowing this kata inside out is like knowing ALL kata as it contains all the elements that make up all kata. I think I must have done this kata 100's if not 100's of times now over the last couple of years of training! The rest for the day was spent training and perfecting our kata and of course doing the ever popular "make up your own kata" kata, a lot of fun! Since moving to Wellington, I have not managed to find an Iaido club to train at as of yet. Despite enquiring at a few martial arts stores (who all seem to say "yeah someone else asked about that a few months back").  So I am looking into starting the Wellington Iaido "study group" under guidance of the Canterbury Kendo/Iaido teacher and hopefully talk more with the other Sensei at the Auckland Kendo club (where I attended the very first NZ Iaido seminar last year). What I am really hoping to achieve is to bring together all those people that may have trained in the past or are looking to start in Wellington.  I still am yet to find a venue, though the Brooklyn Community Centre is looking promising. So this is a call out to any one in the Wellington area interested in training in Iaido.... get in touch! Email: [email protected] It will be great to get something going and build the art of Iaido in New Zealand even stronger! UPDATE: I have been speaking with the Brooklyn Community Centre in Wellington, they seem very open to the idea of setting up Iaido classes at their venue! Will continue to update once I have met with them and organised some dates and times for possible training sessions. read full post

Welcome back to 2010, it has been a while since I last posted anything Techy or Samurai related it reminds me how quickly we can go from leadership thinking to management thinking when one gets very busy (My company re-launched our flagship Guitar learning product Jamorama at the end of 2009 which didn't leave me much time for blogging, a poor excuse I know!). As it happens it looks like Julia (my partner) and myself are moving to Wellington! (NZ's Captial City) for a change of lifestyle and a lot more Film and Television work for Julia.  So I am putting together a proposal to keep working at Rock Star Recipes but remotely! Remote work and more interesting, remote or distance leadership is something I have become very interested in, how can we in 2010 with all the technology easily available to most businesses lead from a distance?  What are the challenges? How does communication, face to face time, company culture and atmosphere differ? I suspect a culture of great communication, trust and respect is key. I'm hoping to document as much as I can while I learn more about this and also put my proposal forward to actually experience and work as a remote staff member and remote leader... Perhaps we are coming to a point where there is no real difference whether someone is in the office or not as long at the end results are met and accountability is key. In the 80's they called it "Tele-Communting" more recently it was dubbed "Tele-Work" (Perhaps to make it sound more like working for those managers who could not let micro-management go?) but I think going forward it will just be "work" as the technology and easy constant contact and communication from anywhere in the world becomes the norm. More to come... Oh, and for those who need their Technology and Ninja fix... check out the new Nexus One powered by Google Android. read full post

I brought up the "5 whys" exercise back in the lecture 2 post last week but to recap the basic idea is to think of an important event that has occurred in your life and ask yourself why that was important. 

Then take your answer and again ask yourself why that answer was important. 

Repeat 5 times.

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Righto here are the questions Tom Matthews proposed last week:

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Yeah so I managed to pick up my name as a domain name... reason... Long term hopefully i will post alot of interesting case studies and information about what i do for a living, perhaps i might write an ebook or something like that I haven't decided yet. For now though the main reason I decided to get this site up and go is that I have just started another paper at the university of Canterbury called "The Principles of Leadership" MGMT208 for those of you course code inclined. The course so far looks very interesting (all be it that there has only been one lecture so far).  Each week our lecturer, Tom Matthews is proposing a series of developmental questions for which we are all to write in his words our "musings" about the questions. What better way to keep track of these questions and share a bit of knowledge than to blog my thoughts on each question.  I guess that also gives others a chance to comment or add to the thoughts and conversation around the question and for us all to learn a bit more. That's all for now... i will post more ideas as the course progresses and start a new blog entry for each of the development questions hopefully within the next week. Thanks Cam

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