Jez Rose » Intrigue Me!

The Culture Claptrap – why is culture not more important?

1 Sep 2017 | Intrigue Me!, Thinking Differently

Ask any CEO, anyone with the title “Head of”, a Brand Manager or anyone in human resources and they’ll all tell you – no matter what industry or organisations type they’re from – that culture is key.

And why wouldn’t they? They’re hardly going to say: “we don’t really care what working environments are like; we’re far too busy for that investing in product and margins – people should put up, shut up and bloody well get on with it”, are they? Yet organisations don’t need to verbalise that as actions speak louder than words: what we do – or don’t do – often has a greater impact that words.

The dreary impact of a lack of focus on environment.

I’m still hearing

Listen to the Bees – Work In Silos!

16 Jun 2017 | Intrigue Me!, The Good Life Project, The Latest News

Honeybee hives can teach organisations a lot about efficient and efficacious models of teamwork.

You may – or may not – know that Mrs Jez and I are beekeepers

As we launch the nationwide expansion of Bees for Business, I’ve written this short article on what observing the honeybee teaches about working more effectively, communicating better and more efficient teamwork in your organisation.

During the peak, summer season the average honeybee hive can

Tales from the Farm – Bees…in the roof

17 May 2017 | Intrigue Me!, The Good Life Project

I love bees even more when they are in the right place

I love bees. That’s why we keep them here at the farm. Well, I say “keep”, but in reality we’re simply guardians of the bees – they are wild animals and we simply provide housing benefit. However, I don’t love the fact that bees (not ours, I might add), have decided to take up residence in our roof.

Some weeks it does seem like this farm is testing the very limits of human capabilities. This week has been one of those.

After we discovered that our bore hole head was leaking (which is in itself an understatement – thousands of gallons of water are pouring out of a crack in it, which we now are in the midst of arranging to

Tales from the Farm – Lessons Learned

14 May 2017 | Intrigue Me!, The Good Life Project

“TV’s favourite gardener”, Monty Don, inspires Jez Rose, a frustrated behaviourist and amateur gardener, to grow a new life, as detailed in Tales from the Farm. Monty Don’s book inspired Jez to buy a farm in the countryside, create his own garden and write about the joy, obsession and mud.

The brand new training barn is finished! My favourite parts are the whiteboard wall and the wild flower roof.

It’s been 6 months since Mrs Jez and I moved into the farm and its also been a while since I last blogged with tales from the farm. That’s partly because every time it looks like we’re about to turn a corner and things are sorted and calming down, we face another major obstacle, or we discover yet another major thing that is broken.

The latest challenge, which is, frankly, putting it lightly, was to discover that our bore hole is leaking. A lot. The inspection chamber was

How to Train a Chicken (the real secrets of leadership, management and team building)

18 Apr 2017 | Intrigue Me!, The Good Life Project, Thinking Differently

You learn so much about people, teams and leadership by training chickens.

Our new chickens, which we’ve named Chasseur, Casserole, Cajun and Stuart are bright, friendly and highly trainable. I’m talking distinguishing between different shapes, coming to you when called, playing the xylophone and even riding a skateboard – and perhaps more useful in your role at work, they can help you to create super switched on management teams, too.

Are they souper chickens? We like to think so!

I have repeated the phrase: “people shouldn’t be allowed children until they have first learned to train a chicken” many times. The reason is that chickens are pretty unforgiving; if they’re bored or you fail to clearly guide them, they’ll just walk off. There are plenty of better things for chickens to do than wait around for you to get your act together and work out what you’re trying to get them to do: pecking the ground, eating grain, preening, taking a dust bath, scratching my rose beds, chasing the dog, having a little bask in the sun – they don’t need you. If you’re in a leadership or management role, that might sound like a familiar situation.

If you want to train them to do the simplest of tasks, like

Going Organic! – Soil and the Organic Leadership System (I made that up)

30 Mar 2017 | Intrigue Me!, The Good Life Project, Thinking Differently

Behaviourist and broadcaster, Jez Rose, blogs about the process of achieving Soil Association Organic Certification for his Cambridgeshire farm and home to The Good Life Project.

Every day something changes – the peas were not there yesterday but here they are today!

Our peas have broken through the soil, my garlic and shallots are sprouting strong and my potatoes (yes, the ones I planted upside down) are shooting! But something interesting happened while I was planting some more herbs up for our kitchen herb garden.

I’d been chatting with my good friend and fellow soil-lover, Blaire Palmer, about leadership. She’s looking to buy a farm to keep alpaca but don’t hold that against her; she’s actually really lovely. When Blaire left, I headed out to

Tales from the Farm – Spring is here!

12 Mar 2017 | Intrigue Me!, The Good Life Project

The first honey bee of the year spotted out (with his friend) on the blossom.

“TV’s favourite gardener”, Monty Don, inspires Jez Rose, a frustrated behaviourist and amateur gardener, to grow a new life, as detailed in Tales from the Farm. Monty Don’s book inspired Jez to buy a farm in the countryside, create his own garden and write about the joy, obsession and mud.

After a fair number of cloudy days, quite a bit of rain and some really strong winds, it looks like Spring is finally here. And that’s why I haven’t blogged from a few days because the weather at this time of the year really does dictate activity – juggling a busy writing and speaking schedule with the long lists of things to do here at the farm has always been tricky but with the new barn going up quickly, there’s even more to get done so e’re ready for our first training course in May!

I’ve managed to

Going Organic! An Inspector Called

6 Mar 2017 | Intrigue Me!, The Good Life Project

Behaviourist and broadcaster, Jez Rose, blogs about the process of achieving Soil Association Organic Certification for his Cambridgeshire farm and home to The Good Life Project.

Irritable, soil-obsessed and socially awkward, the Soil Association inspector was not. Thankfully. I found myself getting a little bit stressed the morning of the inspection; double checking that there wasn’t any plastic that had been overlooked in the compost bin; going over the documents I’d been sent to complete to make sure I hadn’t made any mistakes and snapping at Mrs Jez for leaving a Kit Kat wrapper on the side – a non-organic chocolate bar! What would they think of us?!

As it happens, Mike was nothing short of lovely. In my last blog I said that our inspector was called Andrew – only a few days after writing that Andrew called me to introduce himself; he’s actually our “certification officer” (they all have quite militaristic titles, which make them sound much more intimidating than they are in real life). Andrew’s job is to help support and guide us through the process of becoming certified as organic by the Soil Association. Our inspector, who visits the farm and goes through our plans, paperwork, and site, is Mike. How can I describe Mike? Calming, professional, incredibly knowledgeable and experienced and with more than a little similarity to Michael Parkinson – and he loves

Tales from the Farm – A Little Bit of Cucumber

4 Mar 2017 | Intrigue Me!, The Good Life Project

“TV’s favourite gardener”, Monty Don, inspires Jez Rose, a frustrated behaviourist and amateur gardener, to grow a new life, as detailed in Tales from the Farm. Monty Don’s book inspired Jez to buy a farm in the countryside, create his own garden and write about the joy, obsession and mud.

I cannot believe that having reached my thirties, I haven’t actually ever – as far as I can recall – grown anything from seed. How did that happen? Anyway, I rectified that this week and I’ve got something exciting to share with you, which could well cheer up your workplace, too.

Pots and seeds: the beginning of a miracle

Mrs Jez, Zeus and Marley (the dogs) and I all love cucumbers, so I decided to grow some in the vegetable garden. The seeds arrived this week and I found myself planting cucumber ‘crystal lemon’ seeds for the first time in my life into delightfully cute little pots in the greenhouse.

The packet I bought contained 40 seeds but I remember having a cucumber plant before and they are quite

Tales from the Farm – The Barn Before the Storm

26 Feb 2017 | Intrigue Me!, The Good Life Project

“TV’s favourite gardener”, Monty Don, inspires Jez Rose, a frustrated behaviourist and amateur gardener, to grow a new life, as detailed in Tales from the Farm. Monty Don’s book inspired Jez to buy a farm in the countryside, create his own garden and write about the joy, obsession and mud.

Serious construction work begins to build the new barn.

Regular readers will know that to date, we have had our fair share of challenges with renovating the farm.

We recently discovered that our water is not from a bore hole as previously told but from an artesian well – and has such a high iron content that it’s ruining sanitary ware and staining anything white that we wash! Subsequently we’ve had to send a sample of water off for full chemical analysis, which will result in having to install a water treatment plant.

However, work began last week on the new barn in the yard – it’s going to be a large, open timber structure with vaulted ceiling and will provide a warm training space for The Good Life Project and somewhere for us to press apples and extract honey. Warm and cosy, it’ll face onto an open courtyard and the vegetable garden.

We’ve been planning it for some time, as you can imagine. Which way

Jez's Notebook | Intrigue Me! Archive

The Culture Claptrap – why is culture not more important?

Listen to the Bees – Work In Silos!

Tales from the Farm – Bees…in the roof

Tales from the Farm – Lessons Learned

How to Train a Chicken (the real secrets of leadership, management and team building)

Going Organic! – Soil and the Organic Leadership System (I made that up)

Tales from the Farm – Spring is here!

Going Organic! An Inspector Called

Tales from the Farm – A Little Bit of Cucumber

Tales from the Farm – The Barn Before the Storm

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