If you want to know why people leave your business, don't wait until they've resigned before you ask them.

It’s happened.  One of your highest-performing team members has just resigned and it’s caught you by surprise. Once you recover from that news and regain your comp...

Some months on, I still find Jawbone's demise earlier this year unsettling. Not because the business ultimately failed, but because it received investments totalling a staggering $951,000,000, over the course of sixteen profitless years, on the way to that failure. Tha...

If you work in or near the technology sector, you'll inevitably have had someone at some point exclaim "Do or do not, there is no try!" when discussing the feasibility of a difficult project. In popular culture, we've grown used to the notion that Yoda was a wise and p...

“Are you… a feminist?”   

This was a colleague's opening question to me, delivered after a long pause, during a meeting between us several years ago. This was not how I had expected our meeting to begin and, taken aback somewhat, I paused an equally long time...

"Hero-Silos" form when we publicly elevate the importance of one business function far above its peers. The frequent outcome is to undermine the success of the whole organisation. What drives us to create Hero-Silos in our businesses and why are the consequences so dev...

Why do so many senior hiring decisions later turn out badly?  Although it's tempting to pin the failure on the candidate, it’s really our fault as hiring managers when we make the wrong senior hire. So where are we going wrong?

After product-market fit, the av...

If you apply the popular wisdom of the tech industry to the case of The Beatles, then it’s clear that the band could never have been successful.  It’s simple: they came from the wrong city. In 1962, Liverpool wasn’t a major hiring centre for great bands. The musical ta...

An investor once assured me that culture didn’t matter, that only winning mattered. 

He was wrong. Winning is not an alternative to culture. Winning is what a strong, healthy culture enables you to keep doing. Most experienced leaders intuitively understand this relatio...

…the Commodore on the quarter-deck gets his atmosphere at second hand from the sailors on the forecastle. He thinks he breathes it first; but not so. ”

                                                                      Herman Melville, Moby Dick...