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

Your customer is the hero. You’re the guide. But without a villain, the story has no pulse. In simple terms, the villain is what steals the hero’s win. It creates the problem, raises the stakes, and gives you a reason to exist. And it stops your brand from sounding like a brochure with a logo. Most comms strategies fail for one dumb reason. They describe the offer. But they never name the enemy. An enemy is not a competitor. It can be a bad habit, a broken system, a lazy beli

Drug companies build websites explaining overweight. Long pages, soft colours, and an earnest tone that signals seriousness while inviting absolutely nobody in. Nobody reads them. Nobody clicks them. Because nobody wakes up thinking, I can’t wait to explore a pharmaceutical microsite about BMI. That’s the lie we need to kill. People don’t fail to lose weight because they lack knowledge. They fail because their environment keeps winning. Calories are cheap. Sugar is everywhere

The caveman kneels at the edge of the river. Twenty hunters fan out behind him. Spears down. Breath held. No one speaks. The water is still. Too still to trust. He drags his fingers through it first. Watches the ripples. Listens. Then he leans in. Slow. Careful. He sniffs. Nothing. He dips his tongue. Just a flick. Just enough. Nothing again. The hunters tense. One of them whispers, “Is it dead?” The caveman shakes his head. “No taste.” Another asks, “That good?” The caveman

Most leaders wait a year to give feedback. They watch the same behaviour repeat for months, say nothing, and quietly train people that silence is safer than speed, then unload it all in an annual review like a delayed invoice. That’s not patience. That’s avoidance dressed up as process. There’s a faster way. And it doesn’t need a meeting, a document, or a long emotional wind-up that everyone dreads. The book The Effective Manager says effective feedback takes five to fifteen