Author Info

Around the year 170, the most powerful man alive sat down and wrote himself a weary note about the difficult people he'd meet that day. The Meditations was never intended as a book - it was a leader's journal.

We admire what design looks like and miss what it does. Design isn't how work looks. It's how work works — and it's how ideas become value.

She'd been doing most of the job for a year. They hired someone in over her - the following day she updated her CV.

Sheffield, 6am, a hot coffee and a helter-skelter — and a thought about work. Why the same problems keep coming back, why it's almost never the people, and a few things to try when new faces keep producing the same familiar results.

A company once sent every employee a hamper and champagne just before its engagement survey. The scores were excellent. Then everything went back to normal.

John Wooden’s legacy wasn’t built on winning alone. It was built on behaviour, teaching, and an unwavering belief that how you show up each day matters more than the scoreboard.

For many years I have kept a notebook I call my commonplace book. It is not a diary, not a planner, not a system for getting things done. It is a personal library for thinking — a place where ideas wait until they are needed.

Journaling on an Iron Age hill fort, wild ponies wandering past. Not a diary of events — a thinking partner, and a leadership one too. On paper over screens, the friction that makes it work, and why an honest map beats a beautiful one.

"Hire fast, fire fast" sounds bold, but it gambles with people's lives. Why the more humane, harder standard — hire slowly, fire fast — builds stronger teams.