What's this standing order for?
Busy, spending money, and no nearer where you meant to go. On the thread from investment to activity to value — and what lean portfolio management is really there to protect.
Idea & Value
How ideas move to value — the gap, the cost, the runway, and the learning. Essays in this layer explore the forces that determine whether our investments of money, time, energy and attention produces outcomes.
The lens you didn't choose
It's never theory versus no theory — only which lens you're standing inside, and whether you ever notice you're inside one at all.
Humbled by fractional indices
I'm humbled by fractional indices and would make a poor engineer. But one thing I can do is decide — and I've learned that's rarer, and more useful, than it looks.
Every Wednesday, just before three
A story about who our support systems are really designed to serve, and how to build a team worth the name.
Smiles per mile
At work we've decided friction is simply the enemy, and go to war on it without ever studying what we're removing. This is the lens I use instead: the three kinds of friction, the quadrant, and why a frictionless life isn't the point.
It nearly cost him the business
On what hierarchy is actually for, and why flattening the org chart rarely fixes the thing you're annoyed about.
They turned off the heating
For our anniversary, our local pub had just been told to cut costs by any means necessary. So they'd turned off the heating - one thing everyone was paying for. I got to watch a business raise its costs by trying to lower them, in real time, over a burnt lasagna.
The most hated customers
I once walked into a room and found a whiteboard headed "Our Most Hated Customers." On why service is never a department — it's a signal of how the whole organisation is actually built.
The Puzzle Workshop: A Powerful Way to Teach Business Agility and Leading Change
I use a children's puzzle to teach leaders about change. It sounds childish — but I have now run this workshop over 700 times, with teams as small as six and groups as large as 140. The pattern is always the same.
Design is how it works
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.
The helter-skelter that never ends
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.
I believe you have my stapler
A specialist lost the whole room in seven Japanese words. On a plainer instruction: staple yourself to a piece of work, follow it through the building, and map what actually happens — not what's meant to.