Writing on the web since 2003

Build #99 – Mind the gaps Hey Reader, There’s a particular kind of organisational dysfunction that really been bugging me this year – when everything looks right on paper, yet nothing quite works in practice. This week’s Build pulls together three articles exploring critical gaps that separate intention from reality in how we build companies. What makes these gaps so dangerous isn’t that they’re invisible, it’s that we seem to have become remarkably skilled at pretending they don’t exist at…

Build #98 – AI and the workslop epidemic Hey Reader, I’ve been thinking about a particular kind of waste in business a lot recently. Not the obvious kind – where someone clearly hasn’t done the work or has done it badly. That’s easy to spot and easy to fix. No, I’m talking about something far more insidious: work that *looks* perfectly fine but is actually wholly worthless. It’s work that appears plausible, sounds professional and uses all the right language. But when you really examine it,…

I bring you three articles that circle around a single question: how do you get things done through other people? Whether it’s handing off tasks to your team, thinking about the relational structures that underpin your organisation or building the kind of…

I’ve been thinking a bit about a pattern I keep seeing in the founder-led scale-ups I’ve worked with over the years. It goes like this. Founders hire a “professional manager” to bring structure as their companies grow past the a number of people – usually 20 to 50. That manager arrives with all the creds. They talk about governance frameworks and reporting cadences and accountability matrices (I am aware that I talk…

This week’s Build seems to have inadvertently landed on a theme around the uncomfortable gap between corporate rhetoric and reality. These three articles share a common thread about the limitations of aspiration when confronted with the messy complexity of real organisational life. They challenge us to move beyond comforting abstractions that founders tend to rely upon on towards harder, more honest…

I’ve just completed two organisational design projects with founders looking at creating the first leadership teams for their businesses. That means I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about role clarity. Which got me to noticing the complete absence of it in so many scaling businesses when I first come across them. Let me give you an example. Last week I had a half hour intro call with a founder who told me her team was “totally…

This week’s selection from my inbox explores three different perspectives on how systems resist founders’ best intentions. I bring you insights about birds that teach us about adaptive leadership, the art of saying no without burning bridges and why brilliant ideas fail when they clash with existing systems. A strand that connects all three of this week’s recommended articles is the fact that founder success isn’t…

I’ve been thinking a lot about control lately. Not in some grand, philosophical way but more in the “why did I just spend 20 minutes researching the optimal way to load a dishwasher” kind of way (and yes, I really did that without catching myself). During my reflections I’ve noticed something about many founders – they’re often truly obsessed with knowing everything. They want answers. They want certainty. They want to feel like…