One year on: Building a business was not the career change I expected Dear Reader, Twelve months ago I thought I was changing jobs. Looking back, I think I was learning an entirely new profession. After more than a decade at Living Goods, including seven years as CEO, I stepped away without a clear plan for what came next. I knew I needed a break and perhaps more importantly, I knew I wanted time to think. What I did not know was that running a one-person business would require me to rethink...

The leadership lesson I had forgotten... This photo was taken on one of the breaks I insisted on taking as a CEO. Looking back, I realised I'd stopped taking them The hardest person to give permission to rest is often yourself. Dear Reader, One of the things I always paid attention to as a CEO was whether people actually took their leave. Every quarter I would check in with my leadership team, not because I wanted to know where they were going, but because I wanted to know whether they were...

Scale is not a technical challenge It is an institutional challenge. Dear Reader, Over the past few weeks, I have written about strategy, scale, ecosystems and designing for scale. As I look back over those ideas, I keep coming back to one conclusion. The biggest barriers to scale are rarely technical. More often, they are human. They are institutional. And they are far harder to solve. Scale requires trade offs One of the hardest lessons about working through public systems is that you...