Cultivated

A senior leader stands in front of a slide titled "Our Product Operating Model" and describes, in fluent jargon, what is essentially a project plan with new vocabulary. The shift most enterprises are making from projects to products is real — and it is rarely the shift they think it is.

Meeting Notes is Cultivated's weekly letter — This week: A solid idea is not the same as a valuable one. Sent Sunday. This is the members only archive version.

Meeting Notes is Cultivated's weekly letter — This week: Thinking about the gap between action and knowing. Sent Sunday. This is the members only archive version.

Most organisations have feedback. They just have it too late. By the time the quarterly review arrives, six months of small signals have compounded into one large, expensive surprise — and the window for response has already closed.

Most organisational problems don’t start with strategy or process — they start with misunderstanding. This piece explores why communication is the wiring that connects ideas to value.

Ten executives. Six meetings. A thousand-pound broadband decision. An essay on why debate, at every altitude of the business, is cost — and why small tests are the fastest way to move any idea, in any function, toward any kind of value.

At a conference, a senior engineer told me he couldn't find a good job. Twenty minutes later, a hiring manager told me she couldn't find good people. They were both right, and they were describing the same problem from opposite sides.

In the right hands, a team's metrics are a mirror. In the wrong hands, the same numbers become a lever. An essay on why team-level metrics should never be used to compare teams — and what actually goes wrong when leaders reach down for the numbers.

A startup with £100m in the bank is still running out of money. Every meeting, every experiment, every lesson learned — all of it is cost until a customer pays for something worth paying for. Financial value is generated outside the business, not inside it.