There's a curve most of us live without naming it. From zero to about forty, we're building — a title, a reputation, a way of being recognised. We call it a career, but underneath it's identity construction: ego, pride, a sense of being "someone." It rises the way any...

Complexity Is the Default. Simplicity Is a Discipline. No executive sets out to build a complicated program. Nobody opens a steering committee and says, "let's make this harder than it needs to be." And yet six months in, the program has fourteen workstreams, three...

Simplicity Is Not Simple Few of us are born with it. For most of us, simplicity is not a trait — it's a discipline we have to practise. I see this most clearly in transformation programs. Everyone says they want simplicity. Almost no one is willing to do what...

The Drama Is Real. It Isn't The Whole Story. Watch an executive get defensive in a steering committee. Someone asks a direct question about the go-live date, and the sponsor's jaw tightens, the voice sharpens, the justification arrives before the question has finished...

Incompetence in the Executive Suite We rarely use the word incompetence for executives. It sounds too blunt for people with the right titles, the right degrees, the right number of years behind their name. So we find softer words instead — bandwidth, style,...

Foundations Most of the suffering in our lives — personal and professional — traces back to one thing. Not bad luck. Not the wrong partner, the wrong product, the wrong market. It traces back to a lack of effort or resources spent building the foundations before we...

M = f(t). Meaning Is a Function of Time. I wrote that down before I wrote anything else, because it's the whole argument in four characters. Meaning is not fixed. It moves with time. And most of the conflict I see leaders carry — with their staff, their kids, their...

Comparison is the fool's tool. And most of us are fools. Not occasionally. Not on our worst days. As a default setting. The mind reaches for comparison the way a hand reaches for a railing — automatically, without being asked to. Here is the first thing worth...