Writing.

Essays, frameworks, and field notes from nearly four decades of building, backing, and selling businesses.

No Neutral Ground

Leadership

There are only two playbooks and you are running one of them right now. Not the one in the strategy document. The one your people actually experience.

More writing

  1. Leadership

    The Quiet Capitulation

    The most dangerous sentence in any organisation is seven words long. It is never shouted, it is never challenged, and it feels like stability.

  2. People and Culture

    The Unproductive Hours

    The hours that produce judgement look, from the outside, like nothing happening. AI offers a way to skip them, and the people accepting the offer cannot know what they are giving up.

  3. Leadership

    The Proving Ground

    Crisis does not create the weakness. It strips away the layer of performance that was concealing it. What it finds was decided long before it arrived.

  4. Mindset and Purpose

    Older Than the Lab Coat

    The official sources have been caught lying too often to count, and the alternative space is run by the same architecture. How to read both halves of a compromised field.

  5. Leadership

    Programmed To Apologise

    Senior men now soften before they direct and qualify before they assert. They did not arrive that way. They were taught, across three decades, by a signal they no longer recognise as one.

  6. Finance and Governance

    The Chairman They Ordered

    BP went looking for a relentless, controlling, performance-obsessed operator, then expressed shock when he turned out to be relentless and controlling. The surprise is not credible.

  7. Strategy and Decisions

    Died Of AI

    Three named researchers used a tool to bypass an Apple defence in five days. Three publications gave the credit to the tool. That gap is the story, and the same trick has been run before.

  8. Hospitality

    The Hotel That Ate Itself

    Every fault had a defence already built for it: unreasonable guests, the labour market, the economy, rising costs. When every problem has an external explanation, nobody is left owning the internal decay.