Public speaking and the power of the stage
Dame Judi Dench, Louis Theroux and feeling alive on stage. The power of public speaking.
Gratitude - a way of seeing what often remains invisible
A lot of what underpins a business goes unnamed precisely because it often works. An episode of The Word at Work on gratitude as a form of seeing — and the question it leaves behind about what's carrying your work this week that you've stopped noticing.
Everyone is trying to release value
A product team had twenty million pounds and until year-end to turn it into something people would pay for. Then two other teams' good work landed on top of theirs — and someone had to choose which value moved first.
There Is No Perfect Notebook
There's no perfect notebook — only the right container, with the right rules, for how long a note needs to live. Here's the method, and the six on my desk.
When a Meeting Isn't a Meeting
Most meetings that fail aren't badly run. They produce agreement instead of alignment — and the difference between the two is what people do on Thursday.
The Circles of Contribution
A model of how contribution actually travels across a working life. Four concentric modes — Practitioner, Multiplier, Reader, Author — communication as the carrier, and the practice underneath that keeps good ideas moving through work rather than dying on a Thursday afternoon.
What writers know about keeping an idea alive
Most organisations say they want to turn ideas into value and rarely manage it. Writers do it for a living. Here's what their craft teaches us about keeping an idea's meaning alive, from seed to shipped work.
A podcast is the whole system in miniature
I was in a room of small business owners when one of them asked me to explain how ideas become value.
The case for a Chief Curation Officer
On a family trip round Europe's museums, a pattern kept surfacing: the best ones curate your attention as carefully as their objects. Here's what that has to teach the places we work — and why the most useful skill might be learning to see the room you're already in.
Craft is power — and where your power at work really lives
We've made the word craft soft — craft beer, craft fairs, hand-crafted. Underneath sits an older meaning worth recovering: craft meant power. Here's where yours lives at work.
Speaking as Sense-Making: Why Public Speaking Shapes Leadership
Being good at the work isn't the same as being good at explaining it. Public speaking is how ideas move through an organisation — and how to make yours travel.
The Architecture of Clarity
I thought I was researching old printing presses. Instead I found myself studying operating systems. A journey through the archives of the GPO, Braun, Lufthansa and the BBC — and what they were really building beneath the surface.