Insights

What a book written in 1999 taught me about leadership in 2026 I always try to read at least one book cover-to-cover when I go away on vacation. On a recent 10 day trip to Vietnam I grabbed myself a copy of Frederic Hudson's The Adult Years: Mastering the Art of Self-Renewal. Written back in 1999, it certainly isn't new. It's definitely not trendy, and beyond this, I typically hate self-help books. To be honest, I only read this one because it was recommended to me by a coach

When I started in executive search nearly 21 years ago, the economics were simple and the logic was sound. Search firms charged 30% or more of a candidate's first-year salary and any fixed incentives. The partner I supported would walk into a business development meeting armed with two things: a foot-high stack of business cards back in the office and an intimate knowledge of his own network. He'd talk about exclusive access to candidates, relationships other firms simply did

I published a blog post early last week about how AI is reshaping the core C-suite. The piece got a decent response, but what I didn't expect was the number of direct messages that followed. Not from CEOs or CFOs. From the people who sit one layer out from that inner circle. Chief Information Officers. Chief Data Officers. Chief Strategy Officers. Chief Marketing Officers and one Chief Sustainability officer. I don't want to overstate the numbers, it was probably around 20 di

Artificial intelligence is unlikely to eliminate the top team. What it may do is change the job so fundamentally that the leaders who thrive will look quite different from those who succeeded before. For most of modern business history, the defining logic of executive hiring has been relatively simple: find someone who has done the job before. A CFO who has been CFO. A COO who has run operations at scale. A CEO who has steered a comparable ship. The pattern-matching approach

Let me be direct about something the executive hiring world rarely acknowledges. The way organisations select senior leaders hasn't meaningfully changed in thirty years. Boards define the role. Internal recruiters or executive search firms find candidates who have already done it. Interviews focus on track record, sector experience, and company scale. Maybe there's a psychometric test (all broadly testing for habitual behavioural tendencies). Eventually, someone is appointed

Growth Capacity at the individual level is not enough. An executive can be self-aware, adaptable, feedback-seeking, and cognitively flexible. They can learn fast. They can regulate emotion. They can tolerate ambiguity. And still fail . Because senior leadership is not an individual sport (regardless of what the Alpha's say). At scale, Growth Capacity becomes systemic. The question shifts from "Can this leader grow?" to "Can this leader grow others and therefore grow the syste

The stories told about great leadership are almost always about a decisive moment. The pivot. The bold call. The burning building. That makes for a great story. But it isn't the full story. Many leadership failures don't happen in explosions. They happen in fog. Slow-moving, months-long, soul-grinding fog. The market shifts gradually. The board sends mixed signals. A transformation drags on. A merger integration never quite stabilises. The technology landscape evolves faster

This is the point where many otherwise capable leaders quietly plateau. There's a question most senior leaders never think to ask themselves: Am I expanding what I can do, or am I just getting more efficient at what I've always done? It's an important distinction. Because at some point in every executive career, the thing that got you here stops being enough to get you there. You weren't promoted for your potential to figure things out on the fly. You were promoted for your t

Stop Defending, Start Growing. Most leaders claim they are open to feedback. The claim, on its own, is almost meaningless. The real question is not whether feedback reaches a leader. It is whether it survives the journey inward, whether it is processed, tolerated, and ultimately converted into changed behaviour, particularly when it threatens identity, status, or the story a leader has built about their own competence. During leadership transitions, this distinction becomes

Most leadership plateaus are not caused by a lack of effort, intelligence, or ambition. They are caused by a learning breakdown. As leaders move up, the job quietly changes. What once rewarded execution and expertise begins to demand judgement, adaptation, and decision-making without clean feedback. At that point, what matters most is not what a leader knows, but how effectively they learn. That is where learning agility enters the picture. What learning agility actually mean

Part 1: The Operating System Following on from "Why Some People Keep Getting Better" and "How to Interview for Growth Capacity" Firstly, why have I called this a ' Field Manual'? Because 'framework' sounds like something you'd discuss in a workshop, and leaders don't need yet another framework. They need something they can actually use when they're three months into a role that's nothing like what they expected, feedback is contradictory, and their CEO or the board are demand

A follow-up to "Why Some People Keep Getting Better (And You Can Too)" In the original article, we established that growth capacity isn't about potential in the abstract, it's about the rate and quality of adaptation under increasing complexity. Now here's the practical question that keeps coming up since I published the article: How do you actually assess it when you're sitting across from someone? Here's the truth: there's no single perfect "growth capacity test" that does

I was in a client meeting recently watching two C-suite candidates get discussed. On paper, Candidate A was perfect: ticked every box, had done the exact role before at a similar company. Candidate B had less direct experience and some clear gaps. The board chose Candidate B. Why? The answer isn't what most people expect. It's not because Candidate B was more charismatic, more intelligent, had a better resume, had networked harder or had a more polished LinkedIn profile. It's

If you're crawling over the finish-line in 2025 then this is for you. We love comparing leaders to elite athletes. The analogies are everywhere: mental toughness, peak performance, championship mindsets, playing through pain. Pick up any business book, visit a leadership seminar, and you'll find the language of sport woven through it. But we've been making the wrong comparison. The question isn't whether leaders should think like athletes or push like athletes or recover like

Why the first 100 days of a leadership transition are when self-doubt peaks, and what smart companies are doing about it. The phone call came on a Thursday afternoon. The board had made their decision. She was the new Chief Commercial Officer of a $2 billion industrial services company. Base salary: $450,000. Equity package that could be worth millions. An office overlooking the harbour. She said yes before they'd finished outlining the benefits pack age. That night, over cha

In boardrooms across the country, a quiet crisis is unfolding. As Baby Boomers approach retirement, organisations face an exodus of talent representing decades of accumulated wisdom, pattern recognition, and intuitive expertise that cannot be replicated through training programmes or documentation. Yet paradoxically, age discrimination remains one of the most pervasive forms of workplace bias. Older workers are routinely perceived as less adaptable and valuable than their you

We’re living in an age where more people are carrying the CEO title than ever before. The explosion of tech, founder-led companies and scaling mid-market businesses has produced a wave of new chief executives almost overnight. Some step in with natural leadership instincts. Some land there because the business grew faster than anyone expected. Some take the role because someone has to. At the very top end of town — ASX giants and global corporates — CEO roles usually go to pe

Artificial intelligence is reshaping how organisations operate, innovate, and compete. Budgets are shifting, workflows are being redesigned, and data is becoming the language of decision-making. Yet beneath the technology, a quieter transformation is taking place. The definition of effective leadership is changing. Over the last few years, global research has examined how organisations of different sizes adopt AI, especially small and medium enterprises. While conversations o

When the world tilts and the lights start to flicker, every leader swears they’re built to survive. But talk is cheap in the dark. Only a rare few ever prove it. There’s a moment when the mask cracks, when the easy answers die, and something tougher claws its way to the surface. Resilience isn’t a buzzword. It’s the superpower you earn in the alleyways of adversity. Most leaders flinch. The resilient ones? They step forward, grin at the storm, and whisper: let’s see what you’

I took a brief for a recent search where the board chair said to me, “I need someone who will not make mistakes.” I told him, that person doesn't exist. And if they did, you couldn't afford them. Perfectionism has become the socially acceptable language of fear at work. We admire the people who double-check everything, who never drop a ball, who refuse to hit send until the email is flawless. We call them professional. We call them passionate. Deep down, many of them are scar

The Authenticity Dilemma You’ve landed the new role. The first few months are a mix of excitement, uncertainty, and that quiet, persistent question: “How much of myself should I show?” Modern workplaces celebrate authenticity, but the reality is nuanced. While being "you true self" builds trust and engagement, expressing your whole self  too early can feel risky in unfamiliar environments. The science of character strengths - the 24 universal, research-based traits identifie

I’ve been coaching a founder CEO who recently found himself in a painful but familiar crossroads. After a decade spent building his company from scratch, he’s been offered significant investment capital, enough to take the business global. But there’s a catch: the investors want him to step aside as CEO and bring in a more experienced “scale-up” leader. He’s conflicted. Part of him knows it might be right; part of him feels it’s a betrayal of everything he’s built. He’s consi

When leaders step into a new business, or earn a long-awaited promotion, the advice they hear most often is to “lean on their strengths.”...

AI is a Leadership Issue Anyone else feeling a little overloaded by all the AI talk? I know I am. After two decades recruiting some of...