Every Organisation Has Someone's Initials On It

A wall in Winchester bearing initials dating back to 1772 offers a reminder that every organisation is built on decisions made by people who came before us.

Magnifying the Murk

The telescope didn't improve the view at all. It just magnified the murk.

Public speaking and the power of the stage

Dame Judi Dench, Louis Theroux and feeling alive on stage. The power of public speaking.

Gratitude — a way of seeing what often remains invisible

A lot of what underpins a business goes unnamed precisely because it often works. An episode of The Word at Work on gratitude as a form of seeing — and the question it leaves behind about what's carrying your work this week that you've stopped noticing.

Everyone is trying to release value

A product team had twenty million pounds and until year-end to turn it into something people would pay for. Then two other teams' good work landed on top of theirs — and someone had to choose which value moved first.

There Is No Perfect Notebook

There's no perfect notebook — only the right container, with the right rules, for how long a note needs to live. Here's the method, and the six on my desk.

When a Meeting Isn't a Meeting

Most meetings that fail aren't badly run. They produce agreement instead of alignment — and the difference between the two is what people do on Thursday.

The Circles of Contribution

A model of how contribution actually travels across a working life. Four concentric modes — Practitioner, Multiplier, Reader, Author — communication as the carrier, and the practice underneath that keeps good ideas moving through work rather than dying on a Thursday afternoon.

What writers know about keeping an idea alive

Most organisations say they want to turn ideas into value and rarely manage it. Writers do it for a living. Here's what their craft teaches us about keeping an idea's meaning alive, from seed to shipped work.

A podcast is the whole system in miniature

I was in a room of small business owners when one of them asked me to explain how ideas become value.

The case for a Chief Curation Officer

On a family trip round Europe's museums, a pattern kept surfacing: the best ones curate your attention as carefully as their objects. Here's what that has to teach the places we work — and why the most useful skill might be learning to see the room you're already in.

Craft is power — and where your power at work really lives

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.