All on leadership.
Essays on leadership, judgement, feedback, and how teams actually change under pressure.
AI-assisted versus AI-aware
Using AI to get better at your current role might be the fastest way to make your current role obsolete. The difference is worth noticing.
The person being referred is the one you want to hear from
Second-hand referrals through family or friends are well-meaning but structurally strange. The underlying question about agency is real, but it's complicated by cultural context.
Stop asking for status, start asking for evidence
The single change that unlocks speed in most large engineering organisations. A single page, five metrics, and the courage to defend it.
Leadership in twenty words
You can spend a year reading about leadership. The working definition I keep coming back to fits in a single sentence.
Office gossip points the wrong way
People spend hours discussing departing leaders. The leaders who matter to your next two years are the ones just arriving. Redirecting attention is high-leverage.
Your organisation is already an agent. Your AI agents just have to fit inside it.
Most enterprise AI failures are not model failures. They are operating-model failures - the agent is smarter than the system it lives in.
The compliment nobody records
The best leadership feedback isn't in a performance review. It's what people in another team say about you when you're not in the room.
Useful compounds. Important doesn't.
The most promoted people chase titles. The most irreplaceable ones don't. What looks like the fast track to seniority is often the slow way there.
Hiring smarter people is the easy part
The advice to hire people smarter than you is everywhere. The harder work is what comes after - and it's where most senior managers quietly fail.
One bad meeting isn’t the end of your career
A short reminder I needed myself this week: a meeting that went sideways doesn’t outweigh the contributions stacking up quietly behind it.
Context engineering is the new management skill
The leaders who will thrive in an AI-native organisation are the ones who learn to manage context, not just people.
On winning the Next CIO Award, briefly
A short note on the Next CIO Award, why it matters less as a trophy and more as a forcing function, and the people who made it possible.
Template first, content second (usually)
The choice between content-first and template-first presentation authoring affects more than productivity. It shapes your thinking and your defence against slipping deadlines.
Why a tyre company became the world restaurant authority
A tyre company invented restaurant criticism to sell more tyres. A century later it's the most authoritative dining guide in the world. The patience to play this long is rare.
Leadership communication isn't a soft skill - it's the work
Brisk, framework-laden communication beats vague substance only when the framework actually matches the work.
Leadership is a verb, not a title
The most useful thing I can say about leadership: it shows up in what you actually do, not in what is printed on your business card.
Staying yourself as you grow
On the quiet pressure to compromise who you are in pursuit of recognition, and why I think the trade is rarely worth what people are sold.
The honest paradox of working from home
We say we are more productive at home. But we still want our kids in real classrooms and our holidays in real places. What does that contradiction mean?
Hiring senior engineering managers at BT
A short note from late 2021, when I was building out engineering management at BT digital. It is the sort of post that ages well precisely because it is plain.
Agility is not a vibe
In the summer of 2021 every leadership conference promised "agility". Most of them meant nothing more than "we are nervous". Here is what the word should actually mean.