Blog

You’ve likely witnessed the phenomenon. A murmuration of starlings swirls in the dusk sky - thousands of birds, zero mid-air collisions, no flight plan, no birdy traffic control. Or a team of ants bui...

In the well-manicured corridors of corporate predictability, we love smooth graphs. Growth that ascends in a polite diagonal. Budgets that match plans to the penny. Project plans that look like Swiss ...

It doesn’t begin with a bad decision. It begins with the absence of a question.

The death of a strategy is rarely announced with a trumpet. More often, it slips into the night, unnoticed, as people s...

How short-term financial control can silently dismantle long-term technical capability 

You can tell when Finance has taken over. The strategy starts sounding like an accountant’s spreadsheet. Engine...

How process-heavy internal systems stall innovation and choke Strategic Intent 

Bureaucracy, in its earliest form, was meant to be an enabler. A set of rails to prevent derailments. A record keeper s...

Enemies – Poor Leadership and Strategy and an unreasonable Culture of Fear to risk! 

Somewhere along the corporate road - around the time legal and financial departments began writing handbooks and p...

Why initiative is the lifeblood of innovation, and fear the slowest form of failure:

In every successful organisation I’ve worked with, there has been a consistent undercurrent—sometimes formalised, ...

“Why the best strategies live in conversations, not in PowerPoint folders” 

Over the years, I’ve been handed and examined many documents called “Strategy” on their cover. Some were thick enough to se...

Success is a strange substance. Initially energising, it can also become intoxicating or blindingly arrogant. And if left to harden—without question or renewal—it often turns from fuel into fossil. I’...

If you want to find complexity, you don’t have to look far. It seeps into processes like damp in an old building—quietly, persistently, and always in places you least expect. Most organisations aren’t...

The first time I realised that leadership was less about intelligence and more about energy, I was standing in a High Tech Company in Switzerland, watching an exhausted team half-heartedly push throug...