A scream cuts across the river. You look up. A child is being swept downstream. “Help, the current is too strong!” she shouts. In what looks like a scene from Baywatch, you and your friend drop everything, kick off your shoes and dive in. The current fights you all the way. You grab the child and somehow drag her back to shore. You collapse on the bank, soaked and breathing like hell. “Help!” Another child. Without thinking, you jump back in. Then another struggling child dri

Look at a concrete block. Not exactly a triumph of design. Grey. Cheap. Ugly as hell. And full of holes. Which is precisely what makes it interesting. In 1887, American inventor Harmon S. Palmer patented a machine for moulding concrete building blocks with an opening through the middle. Over the next seventeen years, he kept reworking both the machine and the blocks it produced. By 1904, hollow concrete blocks could still weigh between 45 and 68 kilos. Not ideal when you’re t

“Why should we go with them?” The question comes an hour after you’ve left the building. The woman you spoke to is now sitting at a table with the CEO, the CFO and two other managers. They all look at her. “Well…” She clears her throat. For a second, she can almost see your pitch deck. Slide 12. Or was it 17? The one with the three boxes. Something about seamless. Scalable. End-to-end. Shit. Your 47 polished slides have collapsed into a handful of half-remembered words. A ph

Everything matters. People matter. Purpose matters. Performance matters. Culture matters. Wellbeing matters. Fine. But leadership gets hard when several things matter at the same time and you can’t put them all first. That’s when an old military leadership rule becomes useful. It’s called 3M. Mission. Men. Me. Three words. And they’re in that order for a reason. The Mission comes first. The job is to get the job done. But before you charge off in the wrong direction, you need

I hated physics at secondary school. To be fair, I had bigger things on my mind. Metallica. Iron Maiden. Nirvana. Definitely not thermodynamics. Yet somehow one thing stuck. The second law of thermodynamics. I can't believe I just wrote those five words. Anyway, in plain English, the law says that left alone, systems tend to drift towards disorder unless energy is put into maintaining them. Twenty-five years later, I finally found a use for it. Not in physics. In business. Im

Long before Netflix, TikTok, and doomscrolling in bed, people occasionally had free time and absolutely no idea what to do with it. Some people got so bored that even joining a focus group sounded like an adventure. And on this particular afternoon, one of those people was…you. Maybe you heard there was a free gift. Maybe you just wanted to escape another dull afternoon. I know, crazy. Either way, you said yes. Fast-forward. You're sitting in a small meeting room with a bunch