Cultivated

We've made the word craft soft — craft beer, craft fairs, hand-crafted. Underneath sits an older meaning worth recovering: craft meant power. Here's where yours lives at work.

Being good at the work isn't the same as being good at explaining it. Public speaking is how ideas move through an organisation — and how to make yours travel.

I thought I was researching old printing presses. Instead I found myself studying operating systems. A journey through the archives of the GPO, Braun, Lufthansa and the BBC — and what they were really building beneath the surface.

The CV has survived decades of reinvention around it — and viewed as a communication tool with a purpose, an audience and a context, that survival makes sense. What's missing is something else entirely.

Portfolio began as a leather case for carrying papers. Where the word came from, how its meaning changed — and what a portfolio really is at work.

When I first started out, I did the obvious thing. I got good at the work in front of me. It didn't take long to notice that being good wasn't enough.

Last night I was at a new community event called The Something More Club. Three talks on running a small business, and beneath all three, the same two themes kept surfacing: human connection, and community.

Progress isn't movement — it's seeing. What stop-motion animation reveals about how your ideas actually become valuable.

It was some time in the mid to late 80s. A café in Bristol, a man sitting alone, and a twelve-year-old with a new notebook writing his first ever note. Thirty years on, that habit became all of this — and now a good part of it goes public.