About MANDY

In a Nutshell

You can skip straight to my career highlights at the bottom of this page.

Or for a deeper dive, keep reading:

As a best-selling author, speaker and adviser, and a co-founder and ex-Director of Flight Centre’s UK operation, I’m a veteran in this ‘people’ side of business, but I certainly didn’t start out that way.  I’m more of an accidental HR revolutionary – here’s my story:

mandy johnson

How I started

As a 23-year-old retail store manager I had too many drinks at a conference and told my boss that the way the company hired and trained people was terrible. Two weeks later he rang and asked to meet with me. I dreaded the encounter, feeling sure that he was going to sack me for my outburst. Instead, he sat me down and told me that if I thought I knew so much about people, then I should become the leader of the organisation’s first PeopleWorks area. That was the start of my new vocation.

I spent the next ten years developing systems that would eventually solve the ‘people’ problems of a host of organisations. I’d like to say that it came about because of Einstein-like intelligence or Branson-style business flair but that would be fibbing. I had just three things going for me. The first was that I had no conventional training in HR. My journalism degree, was about as useful as a wet tissue, so I bumbled along, finding my own practical solutions to problems. I realise now how lucky that was, as I was focused on business improvement, not HR, and I wasn’t blinkered by traditional ideas.

The second advantage I had was sheer practice. The company I worked for, travel retailer Flight Centre was expanding at a rapid pace and had a constant requirement for new employees. At one stage they were opening a new business every forty-eight hours and I was continuously recruiting, training and managing people. I interviewed over one thousand people, and because of the awful, gut-wrenching mistakes I made, particularly in the early days, and some good calls as well, I learnt a lot.

My third advantage was that, just when I thought I knew everything about ‘people’ practices, I had the ground ripped out from under me. Shipped overseas to co-found Flight Centre in the UK, my conventional methods proved ineffective in an environment where the company was an unknown, competing against well-established, 800-store, travel agency chains and opening a store a month. I had to attack hiring, leadership and retention from a whole new angle and the techniques I developed eventually became the foundation stones of a whole new system – my seven steps to building a remarkable business.

How I Evolved

It wasn’t until I left Flight Centre and started out on my own that I realised that not everyone thought about this ‘people’ area the way that I did. 

Unlike other disciplines in which objective processes were the very foundation of success,  I was repeatedly told, that good hiring was simply about ‘gut feel’, ‘reading people well’ or using dubious psychometric test data to justify subjective decision-making. This was in spite of all evidence to the contrary that existed within these businesses, such as unfilled vacancies, high staff turnover rates and, of course, disappointing profits.

Similarly when it came to inspiring, performance-managing and retaining people, my consulting clients complained repeatedly that their employees were often late to work, disengaged or fought with other staff, but when I looked at what they were doing, no one was changing anything they did in this area. This is gobsmacking when you compare it to other business disciplines. If sales were down by $100,000 or an IT system kept crashing, no one would say, ‘Oh well, nothing we can do about that.’

Yet it wasn’t until my Bond University executive education seminar Winning The War for Talent became the most popular course of its year that I realized that a lot of what was being talked and taught was rubbish, and that many conventional people practices were actively damaging to both employee’s wellbeing and corporate results.

The Turning Point

This is when I became an active HR revolutionary, determined to prove that what most businesses focused on, such as compliance and policies, were adjuncts to this ‘people’ area, and not accelerators. I began actively researching and testing strategies, including a stint undercover in a yachting company which became  a Financial Review story. I also started writing articles and eventually two books.  My first – Family, Village Tribe (Random House) – made Kobo’s top five in the Business-Entrepreneurship category and is now studied in many MBA courses around Australia. My second book Winning The War for Talent (Wiley Business) featured on SkyBusiness News and trended number three on Twitter in a US radio interview.

I also became interested in how the world of work was changing and what businesses could do to keep up.  For instance, future entrepreneurs won’t just be looking to improve features or benefits of an existing product, to outdo competitors. Complete paradigm shifts in an offerings’ form, transaction or engagement will become the norm, similar to the way movie live-streaming decimated traditional video stores. Elasticity is also now vital, especially in the wake of more frequent crises that impact business, such as the GFC and the COVID-19 pandemic. Operators who can easily ramp up and down in reaction to external events – such as ‘dark kitchens’ offering restaurant-quality delivery meals without the fixed costs of a traditional establishment – are the success stories of the future. I now write and speak on these kind of ideas as well.

I’ve attached a list of some other notable  things I’ve done at the end of this section, for those who might be interested.  On the personal side I am also an avid traveller as I find it clarifies my focus and thinking. I now live in Queensland with my husband (also an author and the 2015 Queensland Book Of The Year Award winner – see www.johnahern.co for his Pan McMillan book On the Road…With Kids ) and two children. 

I continue to write, speak, and advise on current and future strategies that accelerate productivity and profitability, and I challenge conventional business thinking at every opportunity.

Career Highlights:

  • Co-founder and youngest-ever director of Flight Centre’s UK operation.
  • Best-selling business author with 2 books, e-books and audio book – published by Random House and Wiley Business.
  • Media veteran, with many published articles – featured on and in Sky Business News, Channel 7 News, Qantas Radio, ABC Conversation Hour, AFR, Boss Magazine,The Financial Review, BRW, The Age, The Courier Mail and so on .
  • Keynote speaker at 150+ events in Australia/UK/China/Asia/South Africa including the Asia/Pacific Talent Conference in Taipei, Human Capital HR Summit, Managing The Future Conference, Ray White Global Leadership Conference, Virgin Leadership Program, Dairy Australia National Conference, Australian Stockbroker’s Conference, State Library of Queensland Leader’s Conference, Women in Infocomm National Conference and the Corenet National Conference.
  • Experienced presenter – signature masterclasses, facilitator of the Australian Owner/Manager Program, UQ Business School’s edX MicroMasters program presenter to 193 countries, MBA and Incubate student guest lectures, and executive education courses at institutes such as Bond University and the University of Queensland Business School.
  • Business adviser for 20 years working with clients such as Michael Hill, Teys Beef, Heritage Bank, CareSuper, Griffith University, Dairy Australia and so on.
  • A large audience – 30,000+ Twitter followers and 4000+ LinkedIn connections and my latest Future Of Work essay is now an introduction to  Australasian university text books published by Wiley.

To read Mandy’s posts on building remarkable businesses with new research and innovations – follow her on

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