A note to young leaders. A society that reveres its elderly will always outperform a society that adulates its youth. Ours has decided otherwise. We’ve never been better at keeping people alive. We’ve never been less interested in what they found out while they were. It’s worth remembering how strange this is. Our fixation with […]
Late Macquarie dealmaker John Caldon had a simple strategy for closing nervous, near final negotiations: manufacture a small complaint so the other side has something to solve. Reflection is where deals go to die, so give people a problem instead of time to think. Concede late, and let them feel they won. […]
Kelsey Pfendler rowed solo from California to Hawaii and broke both the men’s and women’s records along the way. Her first week was full of hallucinations and lost water, proving her own point that resilience is always messy. Competence rarely feels like anything while you are living through it. […]
John Rawls defined a just society as one you would willingly enter at a random place, knowing everything about it first. Strip away your postcode, your pedigree and your portfolio, then ask what world you would accept. Most principles catch a cold once removed from personal advantage. […]
By 2016, Rafael Nadal was suffering anxiety attacks and would not get into a car without a bottle of water. What rescued his career was not more effort but asking for help, through a call he could not bring himself to make. Pride cannot tell the difference between the two. […]
On his second day, a young agent reminded his boss that smoking indoors was now illegal, then resigned and walked out. Courage rarely announces itself, and it is almost never wasted. Two months later the phone rang with a franchise offer. […]
Read More… from What Quiet Courage Costs, and What It Returns
This note poses a simple hypothetical to explore a bigger leadership lesson: when rules and people collide, which one wins? A rain-soaked wedding in Milan becomes the perfect example of guarding the holy while missing the sacred. It’s a short reflection on remembering who the rules are actually for. […]
Read More… from Rules Exist to Serve People, Not the Reverse
A note to young leaders. If you don’t like change, you’re going to hate extinction. That was one of Fred Smith’s favourite sayings – and for good reason. In 1965, as an economics student at Yale, Smith wrote a paper arguing that the existing air-freight system was broken. At the time, freight was largely a […]
When a young leader is praised one week and blindsided the next, something is wrong. This note unpacks the three tools manipulators rely on: flattery, shame and intimidation, and explains why real leadership never needs them. Sometimes the bravest career move is walking away. […]