All episodes

"Culture eats strategy for breakfast." Peter Drucker never said or wrote it.
It became a popular claim anyway and we often read a good culture into it.
Read plainly, it doesn't say anything about which kind of culture beats a strategy.

This episode explores what that line actually claims, why the gap between stated and lived values is so common that most people read straight past culture statements.
I take a look at what happened after culture became a serious business topic in the 1980s and explore how Edgar Schein gave us a better understanding of how cultures form, transform,...

This reflection episode turns purpose and direction into two practices you can start this week. The first is about sensegiving and sensemaking. Three questions that build the line of sight between one person's job and who their work actually serves, and what to do with their answers once you have them.
The second is direction. Five moves that give people guidance without you standing over them, from agreeing on what good looks like to protecting your team's focus from the noise around it.

Both come with a way of working out where to start. One job and one conversation for...

Ask people what meaningful work is and you get very different answers, yet most of us would take a pay cut for work that has more of it.
This episode is about that gap, why purpose stays so fuzzy, and why it matters more than ever.

I look at two of the most influential management thinkers.
Peter Drucker, whose ideas about good management got reduced to a numbers game and William Edwards Deming, who was ignored at home and listened to abroad, and what both reveal about why good management frameworks cannot fix bad leadership.

This episode shows you why...

What is the foundation to becoming a great listener?
This is the reflection episode following The Talking Reflex. It's designed to be practised, not just listened to.
You'll hear a difficult conversation twice. Once with a manager who performs all the right listening moves and misses everything that matters, and once with a manager who actually wants to understand.
The difference between them is the intention the manager came with.

From there we get into two practices you can start using this week.
The intention check, which is about catching what you really want from a conversation before it runs...

Most managers are sure they listen well while their people don't feel heard.
This episode is about that gap, why it survives, and what us when we don't close it.

I look at the research on how we really listen, why active listening so often becomes a performance without understanding.
This episode shows you what the value of deep listening is.
I also look at the influence of power and organisation structures and company culture, and how AI is making the problem worse.
This is the main episode.
On Thursday, the reflection episode follows with practices to improve the quality...

In the main episode I made the case that psychological safety is a key performance indicator, and that the way we handle AI adoption exposes and amplifies the leadership already in place.

This reflection episode is about what you can actually do about it with your own team.
I share two practices and one principle for building and protecting the environment where people feel safe to say where AI is helping and where it isn't.

The first practice is the muscle underneath all the others.
The second turns AI mistakes into collective learning and trains a team to protect their...

Season 2 opens with the practice that everything else depends on.
Most leaders treat psychological safety as a culture conversation.

Google's own research proved it is a key performance indicator and Amy Edmondson has uncovered its value for over 25 years. So why has so little changed?

In this episode I look at what happens when climates of fear meet the most consequential workplace decision organisations are currently making: AI adoption.
The Nokia story shows what calibrated silence cost a company that should have survived.
The Klarna reversal shows what happens when leadership confuses cost savings with value.
And recent...

Authentic leadership has been one of the biggest ideas in modern leadership development.
More than twenty years of it, and we haven't ended up with more genuine leaders.

In this closing episode of Season 1, I trace how modern authentic leadership movement focused the search for authenticity too much on self-awareness and self-discovery and missed that authenticity in leadership is built in relation with others. At the same time, the organisations leaders work in shape what shows up in the role through what they reward, allow, and tolerate.
The two together are what we end up watching: a workplace performance...

Care is not just good intention. It needs practice.
Three tools to turn caring into practice.

The main episode made the case for why empathy and care are different and why leaders need both.
This reflection episode gives you three practices to make care part of how you lead.

The first is the simplest and most powerful.
Small acts of care propagate through your network in ways researchers have measured, which means you have more influence on the carelessness around you than you may have realised.

The second is a short reflection on the four trust dimensions to consider before...

Do you know the difference between empathy and care?
Many leaders don't. And it's costing us more than we realise.

Most of us have been trained on empathy and assume care comes with it.
But empathy and care don't even activate the same areas of the brain.
And empathy without care is what's been draining leaders for years, without the results we hoped for.

In this episode I take you on the discovery journey that changed how I think about both.
From psychology to neuroscience to philosophy, research has been pointing at a clear distinction for decades. And the difference...