Cultivated

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.

Most struggling teams are not suffering from a lack of activity. They are suffering from a lack of understanding. Before you change anything, you need to see it clearly. This is the approach I have used — and coached others in — for turning around struggling teams.

There is a Japanese word I can't shake. Mottainai. It roughly translates as the regret of waste — but that translation doesn't quite land. It is not just waste. It is the feeling that something valuable has been carelessly lost.

In the summer of 1996, I discovered a button that paused the performance clock. Within weeks I was the fastest checkout operator in the West of Sheffield, then the company. Productivity, according to the numbers, had exploded. Cash in the bank had not.

A group assembles. A team accumulates. The difference between the two is one of the most expensive things most organisations never measure — and one of the most overlooked drivers of performance.

Better processes don’t guarantee better outcomes. This piece explores why improving the wrong system can accelerate failure — and why direction must come first.

There is no single correct way to work. Methods help, but they're not the point. Why feedback and learning matter more than frameworks in turning ideas into value.