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24.03.25
“Playing tennis on Mars”: Why lessons from sport can sideline victory in business
What could Kobe Bryant have taught you about being a better CEO? What can you learn from Bill Belichick about driving your team’s performance? With their shared focus on performance and winning, and because our brains are wired to think in analogies and metaphors, it’s quick and easy to draw comparisons between sport and business leadership. But it can also be lazy and problematic.Continue reading
The Duck-Rabbit & the Polarities of Leadership
A polarity is a paradoxical situation in which two interdependent and seemingly contradictory states must be maintained for success over time. In business, leadership and life, we find ourselves presented by polarities all the time, often without even realising. As leaders, we’re told that we must be great problem solvers. That’s true, but a polarity is not the same thing as a problem, for which a definitive solution can be reached at a given point in time. That’s why the ability to recognise when we are facing a polarity – otherwise known as a paradox, duality, dichotomy, tension, or wicked problemContinue reading
8 Time Management Techniques for CEOs
Time management is one of the most common themes in my coaching conversations with CEOs and other leaders. There’s just not enough time in their calendar to get everything done. It’s a challenge for any leader but it’s particularly acute for executives in the high-growth businesses that I work with, as they realise that they can’t scale themselves at the same rate as their business. Born out of real coaching experience with CEOs and other C-Suite executives, here’s 8 proven time management techniques that will help you manage and leverage your time better. Experimenting with these time management techniques will,Continue reading
A Deliberately Developmental Experiment
When the founders at Future Arc approached me to develop a business-wide coaching programme, they were clear they wanted to do something different. It felt right that a disruptive company that puts talent development at the heart of its organisation should embrace a new approach to developing its people. Fascinated by how we can build organisations and develop individuals for the future, and already drawing on Robert Kegan and colleagues’ work on adult development in my coaching practice, I introduced them to the concept of the Deliberately Developmental Organization (DDO). A DDO is organized around the deceptively simple but radicalContinue reading
Cynefin: a decision making framework for leaders
There’s no shortage of “how to” advice, playbooks, formulas and even secrets and guarantees for business success (at least that’s what the gurus will have you believe). This can work well in complicated situations. But high-growth technology businesses are not complicated, they’re complex. That requires a different approach to growing and leading a business, explored here through the lens of the Cynefin framework.Continue reading
Learning to think for yourself
Advice is everywhere, everyone has an opinion. It’s what to do with it that’s hard. If you want want to be your best self, then need to stop listening to what everyone else tells you and learn to think for yourself. Let’s explore what that means, including the problem with “how to” advice and the benefits of becoming an independent thinker in a complex world.Continue reading
How can leadership team coaching help your technology business scale?
In his 2017 TED Talk Want to get great at something? Get a coach, Atul Gawande tells the story of the Harvard and Yale American-rules football teams: “In 1875 Harvard and Yale played their first game. Yale hired a coach Harvard did not. The results, over the next three decades Harvard won just four times. Harvard hired a coach”. Every high performing sports team has a coach, why doesn’t every leadership team?Continue reading
Every entrepreneur needs a coach, mentor & therapist
Like any high-performing individual, leaders need to wrap a professional support team around them if they are to give themselves the best chance of success. That team must be trustworthy, objective, and acting always in the leader’s best interests. This post unpacks the difference between a coach, mentor and therapist and explains why, together, they can make up a such a cohesive support team.Continue reading
Developing a leadership culture in your high growth technology business
The internet is awash with articles about the importance of developing a positive company culture. Less less commonly discussed is the importance of developing a positive leadership culture. But what is leadership culture, how does it link to your organizational culture, and how can you nurture it to support the rapid growth of your people and business?Continue reading
Trillion Dollar Coach – A Summary
Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Handbook of Silicon Valley’s Bill Campbell is a book about a man who coached the CEOs and leaders of some of America’s greatest companies, including Apple and Google. He passed away in 2016, leaving a legacy of growing companies, successful people and an enormous amount of respect. The book is essential reading for any manager or leader operating in a fast-moving, high growth business.Continue reading
How to avoid being duped by survivorship bias
It’s easy to see, and pay attention to, only successful individuals and businesses, not the failures that fall by the wayside. This phenomenon is called survivorship bias, a cognitive error that occurs when we focus on the people or things that have “survived” a particular process while overlooking those that did not, which leads us to incorrect conclusions about a situation or phenomenon.Continue reading
Ray Dalio identifies the 11 characteristics of visionary leaders
Ray Dalio’s book Principles: Life & Work identifies the author’s organically grown set of principles for building a successful life and business. According to Dalio, principles are fundamental truths that serve as the foundations for behaviour that get you what you want. Dalio also details the personal research he conducted into visionary leadership. Through interviews with the likes of Bill Gates, Reed Hastings, Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk, he identified the characteristics of visionary leaders. This post summarises his findings, with a particular focus on ‘shapers’, as Dalio refers to them.Continue reading
Second-level thinking & how to get better at it
Second-level thinking is a deep and complex approach to decision-making that goes beyond superficial analysis. Second-level thinkers ask probing questions and consider multiple perspectives to gain a more comprehensive understanding of a situation. They examine a range of potential outcomes, assess probabilities and compare their views to the consensus. They uncover insights that others may overlook, allowing them to make more informed decisions and achieve superior results. By thinking unconventionally and holding well-reasoned, non-consensus views, second-level thinkers position themselves to succeed in investing, business and life. But how do they do it? Howard Marks is the Chairman and cofounder ofContinue reading
Daniel Kahneman on the cognitive biases of entrepreneurs
Thinking Fast and Slow is a book about biases of intuition. It’s ideas are so potent that they won it’s author Danuel Kahneman a Nobel in economics. Kahneman identifies that the human brain works very well most of the time and our judgments are sound. However, it is prone to engage in a number of fallacies and systematic errors that lead to flawed opinions and adverse decision making, otherwise known as cognitive biases. We assume certain things automatically without having thought them through carefully. Kahneman calls these assumptions heuristics and, for entrepreneurs, they can be deadly. An awareness of them is theContinue reading
The best business & leadership quotes from ‘Shoe Dog’ by Phil Knight
Phil Knight is the founder, former CEO and now Executive Chairman of Nike. In Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike he tells his story of taking the business from humble origins, through an IPO in 1980 and onto its current $30 billion market capitalisation. Nike is still widely regarded to be one of the most innovative companies in the world. Phil Knight started and grew the business out of the back of a van in the early 1970s. A Stanford graduate, avid reader of the Classics and books about military strategy, and a natural introvert, he captures aContinue reading
Cancer & Entrepreneurshit
On 13th February 2015 I was diagnosed with Stage 3 colorectal cancer. At the beginning of August this year my treatment was complete. After nearly two years of grappling with a life-threatening illness, whilst at the same time hanging on to the bones of a business that I had set up just eighteen months before diagnosis, it is time to embrace the new normal. This is my story about cancer and entrepreneurshit.Continue reading
Cancer & Entrepreneurship
Disillusioned with the corporate world and mesmerised by a whole season living in my campervan in the French Alps, I decided it was time for another change. In September 2013 I resigned from Deloitte Consulting and set up my own business as an entrepreneur coach. After five months spent climbing and skiing consequential lines, my rationale was simple: entrepreneurship was going to push me hard and I might end up penniless, but I’d learn a lot and it couldn’t kill me. On that basis, and with some ideas about how I’d grow my business in mind, the decision was made.Continue reading
What’s wrong with The Lean Startup
The Lean Startup, by Eric Ries, was first published in 2011 and has since become the bible for startup entrepreneurs around the world. More recently, the approach outlined in The Lean Startup has received criticism, but is that fair? In this post I argue that it is not, because that is all it is, an approach, albeit a very good one.Continue reading