Idea to Value (Physics)
The four types of value
The question is not whether something is a cost. Everything requires investment. The question is whether that investment moves the organisation closer to creating something valuable.
Latest
Orientation & Direction (Map)
Turning around a struggling team — a six-stage approach
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.
Creativity & Climate (Engine)
Mottainai - The most hopeful word I know
Usually read as the regret of waste, mottainai points somewhere more hopeful: the time, energy and attention we bring to work were never a cost — they're potential, backed.
Idea to Value (Physics)
The Subtotal Button — What a Supermarket Checkout Taught Me About Metrics
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.
Creativity & Climate (Engine)
The new player at the table
Every new player slows the poker game while everyone re-explains the rules. Plenty of workplaces run the same way — on why stable teams compound, and why you flow work to teams, not teams to work.
Creativity & Climate (Engine)
Creativity Is a Climate Problem - Why Leadership Isn't About Ideas
Creativity isn't a talent problem. It's a climate problem. Five conditions consistently show up in environments where creativity actually flows — not as theory, but as reality.
solo creator
Everything between idea and value is cost — the solo creator's central problem
Most people aren't short of ideas — they run out of runway before the idea pays back. A canonical Cultivated essay for solo creators, makers, and independent builders on the gap between idea and value, and why everything inside it is cost.
Creativity & Climate (Engine)
Third of Three
Aged thirteen, I had NBA dreams and a basketball team that finished third of three. On the question everyone skips when chasing something ambitious — is this the team to get it done?
Idea to Value (Physics)
No More Cowboys
I spent the better part of a year planning "No More Cowboys" before Checkatrade beat me to it. On why planning feels safe, only doing reveals the truth, and the very good plan beats the best one.
Creativity & Climate (Engine)
The weight of work without reason
Work becomes heavy when it loses its reason. This piece explores why connecting investment to value — a core idea in portfolio thinking — brings clarity, learning, and better decisions.
Idea to Value (Physics)
A sartorial disaster
I'm a sartorial disaster. My friend wasn't — and when strangers asked him to make their clothes, he leapt without once weighing the problems that came with it. On the two sides of every coin, and when not to turn it over.
Idea to Value (Physics)
The oversized crisp
The summer I worked in a snack packing factory, the hopper filtered out everything that didn't fit — without once checking who'd dropped it in. On why most organisations can't.