Cultivated

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.

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.

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.

A startup with £100m in the bank is still running out of money. Every meeting, every experiment, every lesson learned — all of it is cost until a customer pays for something worth paying for. Financial value is generated outside the business, not inside it.

Most struggling teams are not suffering from a lack of activity. They are suffering from a lack of understanding. Before you change anything, you need to see it clearly. This is the approach I have used — and coached others in — for turning around struggling teams.

There is a Japanese word I can't shake. Mottainai. It roughly translates as the regret of waste — but that translation doesn't quite land. It is not just waste. It is the feeling that something valuable has been carelessly lost.

In the summer of 1996, I discovered a button that paused the performance clock. Within weeks I was the fastest checkout operator in the West of Sheffield, then the company. Productivity, according to the numbers, had exploded. Cash in the bank had not.

A group assembles. A team accumulates. The difference between the two is one of the most expensive things most organisations never measure — and one of the most overlooked drivers of performance.

Better processes don’t guarantee better outcomes. This piece explores why improving the wrong system can accelerate failure — and why direction must come first.