Leadership and Work in Practice
A practical breakdown of the Lion, T-Rex, Mouse and Monkey communication styles—and how to adapt your behaviour for clearer, more effective communication at work.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Better processes don’t guarantee better outcomes. This piece explores why improving the wrong system can accelerate failure — and why direction must come first.
Work becomes heavy when it loses its reason. This piece explores why connecting investment to value — a core idea in portfolio thinking — brings clarity, learning, and better decisions.
A tech company builds a new platform. The launch is a success. Three years later the operational cost has exceeded the original investment several times over.