Books

book cover

Winning the War for Talent

How To Attract And Keep The People Who Make Your Business Profitable

As seen on Sky Business News  and in the Australian Financial Review, BRW, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, Canberra Times, WA Times, The Courier Mail, NZ Business Magazine, Management Today, HR Daily,  and many more.

  • As a director of global travel giant Flight Centre’s UK start-up operation, Mandy Johnson couldn’t attract and keep good people to work in her new stores. In a bid to save her career she threw away the HR textbooks and by experimenting with new techniques, created an unconventional people system that produced astonishing profit results. This engaging step-by-step guide, uses entertaining real-life business examples and includes:
  • The 7 step Highfliers people system that is universally applicable and produces immediate business improvement.
  • The three secret weapons to great recruitment that are easily implemented; don’t cost unlimited funds; are ignored by the majority of organisations; and are so rarely used that those who apply them stand out like beacons in the marketplace.
  • Objective, evidence-based measuring tools, KPIs and templates that align people practices with profit goals and make an organization a place people want to work!

Click here to read a review of this book in:

Training and Development Magazine

HR Monthly

Inside HR Magazine        

Management Today Magazine

book cover

Family Village Tribe

The Evolution Of Flight Centre

Rated a Kobo Top Five book in the Business – Entrepreneurship category on its release, and an Australian best-seller!

From its origins as a London-based double-decker tour outfit in 1973 FCL has morphed from a single retail store into a multi-billion-dollar publicly listed global company using unconventional strategies such as dividing its entire workforce into prehistoric ‘families’, ‘villages’ and ‘tribes’ and incentivising every single staff-member on the outcomes of their roles. The company revolutionised the Australian travel industry, and has faced many challenges including the War on Terror and SARS that wreaked havoc on business. It battled the encroachment of the internet; a disastrous internal restructure; and a US acquisition that delivered a profit wipe-out, just months before the global financial crisis. And yet each time FCL has come back stronger than before, almost doubling in size every five years, relying on its Stone Age tribal structure as its platform for success. Its founders were two 23-year-old veterinarians from Queensland, Australia. Neither had any business experience and the idea for the company was hatched while celebrating in a Munich beer hall . . . So how did they make it work?

A bestseller in Australia, in the top five in kobo’s Business – Entrepreneurship category, and now studied in many Australian MBA courses, this insider’s view of an extraordinarily successful company is essential reading for anyone interested in the machinations of starting a successful business from the ground up and staying there. Now available in paperback, e-book and audiobook.

Recommended reads:

I post here books that I’ve read that are well-written, practical and thought-provoking. Here are my latest favourites:

Scroll to Top