When a Meeting Isn't a Meeting

Most meetings that fail aren't badly run. They produce agreement instead of alignment — and the difference between the two is what people do on Thursday.

The Circles of Contribution

A model of how contribution actually travels across a working life. Four concentric modes — Practitioner, Multiplier, Reader, Author — communication as the carrier, and the practice underneath that keeps good ideas moving through work rather than dying on a Thursday afternoon.

What writers know about keeping an idea alive

Most organisations say they want to turn ideas into value and rarely manage it. Writers do it for a living. Here's what their craft teaches us about keeping an idea's meaning alive, from seed to shipped work.

A podcast is the whole system in miniature

I was in a room of small business owners when one of them asked me to explain how ideas become value.

The case for a Chief Curation Officer

On a family trip round Europe's museums, a pattern kept surfacing: the best ones curate your attention as carefully as their objects. Here's what that has to teach the places we work — and why the most useful skill might be learning to see the room you're already in.

Craft is power — and where your power at work really lives

We've made the word craft soft — craft beer, craft fairs, hand-crafted. Underneath sits an older meaning worth recovering: craft meant power. Here's where yours lives at work.

Speaking as Sense-Making: Why Public Speaking Shapes Leadership

Being good at the work isn't the same as being good at explaining it. Public speaking is how ideas move through an organisation — and how to make yours travel.

The Architecture of Clarity

I thought I was researching old printing presses. Instead I found myself studying operating systems. A journey through the archives of the GPO, Braun, Lufthansa and the BBC — and what they were really building beneath the surface.

Is the CV Still the Best Way to Represent Professional Value?

The CV has survived decades of reinvention around it — and viewed as a communication tool with a purpose, an audience and a context, that survival makes sense. What's missing is something else entirely.

Portfolio — a declaration of what deserves your attention

Portfolio began as a leather case for carrying papers. Where the word came from, how its meaning changed — and what a portfolio really is at work.

The three areas of learning — and the one very few people invest in

When I first started out, I did the obvious thing. I got good at the work in front of me. It didn't take long to notice that being good wasn't enough.

Putting the human back into the work

Last night I was at a new community event called The Something More Club. Three talks on running a small business, and beneath all three, the same two themes kept surfacing: human connection, and community.