Writing on the web since 2003

Build #114 – Why the changes don’t stick Hey Reader, Last week’s Build issue on reorganisations that never end sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole about change. Right now I’ve got two live projects where change is a particularly strong theme (although of course it’s a common strand across everything I’m working on, as ever). The thing that’s been buzzing away in my mind has been about we build organisations that can cope and thrive on constant evolution. For the theory geeks on this stuff,…

I’ve been mulling over this article about working at Lovable for a couple of weeks now and it’s really stuck in my mind. It’s by Elena Verna who’s been in senior growth roles at a long list of tech companies and is now just over a year into working at Lovable (in case you’ve been living in a cave for the last few years, it’s an AI app-building company). She’s honest that her perspective is based on one company and she can’t always tell…

I seem to be doing a lot of interviewing at the moment for clients. I guess that’s a logical follow-on from the senior team design work that I had going on earlier in the year. I have to admit that interviewing for senior hires is one of the things I find hardest in my work, even though I’ve been doing it for a very long time. Often I’ll be interviewing with a founder who usually is desperate for the person sitting on the call in front of us…

This month’s been a busy one with potential new clients getting in touch with me. It must be the “back to school” feeling with founders wanting to address those longstanding problems that have been holding them back. I finally had a bit of time last night to reflect on the initial calls I’ve done so far. I noticed a bit of a theme across three of them. They were three different founders in three very different sectors – but broadly all…

“We need more accountability in the business.” I hear a version of that line in nearly every business I go into. Sometimes it’s from the founder or sometimes it’s from someone three levels down who’s fed up and has been for a while. And it’s almost always said with real feeling. But when I ask what accountability would look like on a Tuesday morning, people tend to go quiet. Accountability is one of the few problems I see in every…

I was out on a run last Friday in the flat grey drizzle in Kent, half-listening to a podcast because the weather wasn’t giving me much else to look at. But it didn’t take long before I properly started listening. It was the latest episode of the great Trenton Moss’s podcast, Human Powered, where he was talking to Ben Tye, CEO of Gate One. Ben spends four days a week running a 300-person consultancy and one day a week working as a…

One of the first things I did when I got back to my laptop at the end of my summer break this week was open a client summary document I’d put together when I was shutting up shop in mid-July. I do these documents as a little routine to help me capture all the context and nuance for the work I’m doing with each client before I go away. It helps smooth the path back into the engagement for me when I restart work. And this document was…

I’m back from a few weeks off work this summer – with plenty of time for travel, reading, running and cycling. The time away from work has been invaluable reflection time. I find the distance this gives me from the day-to-day helps me see patterns that aren’t visible when you’re in the middle of things. One of the things I noticed this summer was that in many of the businesses I work with, it feels a lot harder to get a team aligned…