Leadership and Work in Practice
On hard and soft communication, and why rigidity is the real problem.
A job interview, a British roadworks joke, and a question: in any organisation, how many people make the thing of value — and how many are there to arrange, watch and manage the making of it?
A manager once asked what it would cost to keep the office open all night so she could watch a team she didn't trust. On micromanagement, the hidden cost of not trusting your people — and how that distrust travels, unchanged, all the way to the customer.
Cycle time is the hidden distance between having an idea and anyone feeling its value. On flow rather than speed, variation as the real signal, and why the clock measures honesty more than efficiency — the lens on the Idea to Value system.
A friend who worked a conference like his own front room taught me the most underrated skill in any organisation. We don't build relationships with companies — we build them with people, and that's what work actually runs on.
A forgotten bottle of suncream, an hour to kill in a Greek taverna, and a retired schoolteacher who never stopped learning. On how to actually study — and why most of what we call studying isn't learning at all.
Noticing is a wonderful and valuable human skill - it's also a reflection of ourselves.
An executive came back from active-listening training and turned, overnight, into something out of a horror film. On the ear, the brain and the heart — and the one part of listening no course on earth can install.
Adrift and driving cheap sports cars I couldn't afford, I wrote down the future I wanted after my first son was born. It wasn't manifestation. It was orientation — and everything downstream changed. The same thing works in work.