Engine — Creativity & Climate
The meeting ends. People file out. Nobody lingers. There is no laughter, no side conversation that runs a minute too long — just movement from one room to the next. Experienced leaders notice it before they can name it.
meeting notes
Meeting Notes is Cultivated's weekly letter — Sent Sunday, also in the members' archive. This week: Revisiting the ratio of adding value, or auditing those who do.
Flywheel — Learning & Practice
We were scaling fast and the standard hiring playbook wasn't working. Skills alone didn't tell us who would thrive. So we studied the outliers.
Physics — Idea to Value
Many organisations replacing people with AI aren't cutting costs — they're moving them, and often widening the gap between their ideas and the value those ideas should generate.
Physics — Idea to Value
A senior leader stands in front of a slide titled "Our Product Operating Model" and describes, in fluent jargon, what is essentially a project plan with new vocabulary. The shift most enterprises are making from projects to products is real — and it is rarely the shift they think it is.
Wiring — Communication
Most ideas don't stall because they're wrong. They stall because they never created value for the listener — and there's a small shift that changes how a room responds.
meeting notes
Meeting Notes is Cultivated's weekly letter — This week: Thinking about the gap between action and knowing. Sent Sunday. This is the members only archive version.
Physics — Idea to Value
Most organisations have feedback. They just have it too late. By the time the quarterly review arrives, six months of small signals have compounded into one large, expensive surprise — and the window for response has already closed.
Wiring — Communication
Most organisational problems don’t start with strategy or process — they start with misunderstanding. This piece explores why communication is the wiring that connects ideas to value.
Physics — Idea to Value
Ten executives. Six meetings. A thousand-pound broadband decision. An essay on why debate, at every altitude of the business, is cost — and why small tests are the fastest way to move any idea, in any function, toward any kind of value.
Map — Orientation
At a conference, a senior engineer told me he couldn't find a good job. Twenty minutes later, a hiring manager told me she couldn't find good people. They were both right, and they were describing the same problem from opposite sides.
Physics — Idea to Value
In the right hands, a team's metrics are a mirror. In the wrong hands, the same numbers become a lever. An essay on why team-level metrics should never be used to compare teams — and what actually goes wrong when leaders reach down for the numbers.