The Uprising

The Uprising, the newsletter for the Ready to Rise Community delivers bold insights, real-world strategies, and empowering leadership lessons for ambitious professionals scaling their impact. Curated by Cathie Reid, it features practical tools, candid stories, and reflections from global events - all designed to help you grow, lead, and rise into your next level with clarity and confidence.

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I’m well known for filling pretty much every available moment with a task. Downtime tends to look to me like an opportunity to add something else to the list. My daughter has introduced me to needlepoint, which turns out to be a very good activity for someone with that particular habit. It requir...

Oct 13, 2026 downtime leadership mindful

Nice Guys Don't Finish Last

A lot has been written since Chris Fagan announced last Thursday that he was retiring from his role as Senior Coach of the Brisbane Lions, just days after the Lions won their third consecutive premiership. And rightly so, it’s been a truly extraordinary decade. When Chris took on the role, it was...

Oct 05, 2026 brisbane lions leadership lessons from sport

Preparation Creates Opportunity

On Saturday I watched one of the most incredible finishes to an AFL Grand Final in history. From my perspective as a Director of the Brisbane Lions, it was an amazing outcome - and one that, even after watching the replay of the final five minutes multiple times since, I’m still struggling to bel...

Sep 28, 2026 brisbane lions finals football leadership lessons from sport opportunities

Seize The Moment

I’ve had a pretty crazy few days, with a dash back from London to Melbourne for the Lions’ Preliminary Final at the MCG on Saturday night, before heading back to London on Sunday morning. Why did I do it? There were a couple of reasons. Prelims tend to be amazing games and, having had the great f...

Sep 21, 2026 brisbane lions finals football leadership lessons from sport opportunities

The Business Value of Joy, Nostalgia and Human Connection

Last Friday night I had the great privilege of attending the opening of the Jim Henson Company exhibition at GOMA in Brisbane. It’s the first time an exhibition of this magnitude has been staged outside the US, and as the crowd waited for the formalities to be over and the doors to open, there wa...

Sep 14, 2026 human connection jim henson leadership muppets nostalgia sesame street

The View From Somewhere Else

I've spent more of this year outside my own time zone than in it, Munich for a Salesforce summit, Paris and Rome in the same fortnight, and long stretches in London for a consultancy project. Somewhere in the middle of all that, I noticed something shift that had nothing to do with jet lag. Being...

Sep 07, 2026 intentionality leadership perspective

The Number You Hope No-one Asks You About

I’ve sat around enough boardroom tables to know there’s a particular moment when you find out whether someone is really across their business. They can talk confidently about strategy, growth and market position. Then someone asks a relatively straightforward question. What’s the actual margin on...

Aug 31, 2026 leadership numbers scalability

Build to Leave, Even If You Never Do

Last week I wrote about the business that's outgrown the word startup but is still calling itself one, because keeping the label means nobody has to build the systems that should have existed years ago. If you dropped the label this week, there's a harder question sitting right behind it, could y...

Aug 20, 2026 exit strategy leadership scalability

Are You Scaling or Just Spinning?

On this month's Ready to Rise webinar, someone told a story that's stuck with me since about a business that they had encountered that was twelve years old but was still being introduced as a startup. Not as a throwaway line, but as how that business explained away the fact that there's no real p...

Aug 12, 2026 leadership scalability scale up start up

Personal Scalability - My Long Haul Travel Playbook

I’ve spent a lot of time on long-haul flights over the past year courtesy of a consultancy project, and one of the questions I’m asked most often is how I manage jet lag, productivity and the inevitable exhaustion that comes with crossing multiple time zones. The interesting thing is that the str...

Aug 05, 2026 leadership scalability travel

The Speech That Wasn't About Us

Last Thursday night, Stuart and I were inducted into the Queensland Business Leaders Hall of Fame, at a black tie dinner at the Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre. Six new inductees, individuals and businesses, walked across that stage, joining a list of Queensland leaders the Hall of Fame...

Jul 30, 2026 founder life leadership qblhof queensland business hall of fame

The Power of Removing Friction

I've always been fascinated by businesses that remove friction. Whether it's healthcare, technology or hospitality, the organisations that consistently stand out are usually the ones that make life simpler for their customers. Last week I experienced one of the best examples I've seen - and it ha...

Jul 22, 2026 customer experience friction

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The Uprising

The Uprising, the newsletter for the Ready to Rise Community delivers bold insights, real-world strategies, and empowering leadership lessons for ambitious professionals scaling their impact. Curated by Cathie Reid, it features practical tools, candid stories, and reflections from global events - all designed to help you grow, lead, and rise into your next level with clarity and confidence.

The Uprising

The Uprising

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