Build

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…

I was on holiday in a remote bit of Portugal earlier this month, mostly unplugged and doing the thing I always do on holiday – reading random stuff that I’ve been saving up because I never have time to get to it normally. Deep in that list was a psychology paper about how researchers measure problem solving in children. It’s not obvious holiday reading, I’ll admit, but bear with me. The paper picked apart the…

I was out running yesterday lunchtime (not a good idea in a UK heatwave but that unusual hour gap in my calendar was too good to pass up!). Running is reflection time for me. Yesterday I was mulling over some of the patterns we’ve seen since launching Mallard earlier this year. Regardless of the type of business, the sector and the culture of the particular business, we hear very similar refrains from founders on our initial calls:…

Build #104 – I should have done it sooner Hey Reader, “I should have done it sooner.” It’s something that I’ve said (or thought) a lot over the years, regardless of the job I was in at the time Different roles, different businesses, different phases of my professional life but the same five words kept on popping up. Looking back it strikes me that it’s not the big leaps forward that I remember most vividly – it’s actually the things I didn’t do or the things I left too late. After working…

SPONSORED NEWSLETTER Build #103 – Your BOS tool won’t save you (but it might just help) Hey Reader, I talk a lot about operating systems – more specifically business operating systems (BOS) – things like EOS, Scaling Up and their ilk. And even more specifically I’ve been doing a client project reviewing the tooling options to support their BOS – yes, systems to run a system. It’s all getting a bit meta. I’ve been doing a market appraisal of the software tools that have sprung up to help…

Build #102 – Autonomy without boundaries just isn’t autonomy Hey Reader, I’ve been thinking about something that came up in a project I’m delivering at the moment (it’s funny how these little moments sit with me for days afterwards). I’m working with a tech SaaS client on building the “practices” component of their bespoke business operating system. I was leading a workshop exploring how decision-making needs to change as they make a fairly rapid push from 35 to 95 people over the next year….

I’ve been noticing something over the last month that’s been making me increasingly uncomfortable, so I wanted to share that in this month’s Build. Let me give you an example that stuck in my mind. Last Tuesday, I was reading a Slack message from a founder I’m working with. It was perfectly constructed, well formatted with clear bullet points and a nice professional tone. But still it took me reading it three times to realise what was really…

Build #100 – Ringing the changes Hey Reader, One of the things I seem to do a lot with founders is prioritisation. There’s a real purity in knowing what to focus on and where to place the effort we put into building businesses. And now it’s time for me to take a bit of my own advice and get my house in order. Many of you will know that a real focus for me this year so far has been launching and building my new operating partner business – Team Wakeman, as well as my new founder newsletter The…