Want to know who often sounds the dumbest? The person trying the hardest to sound smart. You can hear it right away. The long words. The stiff tone. The sentence that walks in wearing a suit three sizes too big. I see this with my clients all the time. They take a sharp idea and bury it under boardroom sludge. They stretch it into bloated paragraphs and use words nobody says out loud in real life. And then the room goes quiet. That is why I like looking at people who make har

If you run a team, steal this for every new hire. I wrote before about keeping a WTF list when you first join a company. A private record of everything that makes you stop and think, what in God’s name is this? The same move belongs on the leader’s side too. Give it a name and build it into onboarding. If WTF feels too spicy for HR, call it the Fresh Eyes Report. Same knife. Safer label. Hand the new person a blank doc on day one. Tell them they have fresh eyes and their firs

You’ve seen the word ‘remarkable’ everywhere. On websites. In decks. Across pitches that promise a lot and say very little. It once had bite. Then people sanded the edge off it until it could barely cut. Then Seth Godin gave it teeth again . PS. If you don’t know jewellery, know your jeweller. That’s Buffett’s rule. It’s the same with messaging. Smart ideas die in boring words. If you don’t know the game, find a partner who does, because your reputation is on the line. I hel

Dates. Definitions. Lists. In school , it’s all recall. Say it right, get the mark, keep the peace, and make teachers smile. Then you step into the real world and learn something fast. Nobody pays you for what you can recite. They pay you for what you see, what you judge, what you build, and whether you can make the call when things get messy and the room is watching. Because memorisation fills notebooks. But evaluation and creation move markets. Enter Bloom’s Taxonomy. It’s

In sport they split mistakes into two buckets. Skill errors. Effort errors. A skill error happens when someone tries the right move but doesn’t yet have the skill to pull it off. The pass goes loose. The timing is off. The read is late. It’s not ideal, but it’s fixable. In rugby, Brendan Venter used to say you never punish that. You train the skill. You drill it. You coach it until it’s clean. Then there’s the other kind of mistake. The one that rots a team from the inside. T

Back in 2013, Tiny Speck, the team behind Slack, had a positioning problem. They’d built something useful. A group chat tool called Slack. But nobody was shopping for a “group chat tool.” On 31 July 2013, Slack founder Stewart Butterfield wrote a memo to his team and drew a hard line. Stewart is typing now: What we are selling is not the software product — the set of all the features, in their specific implementation — because there are just not many buyers for this softwa