Category Archives: Books

The Duck-Rabbit & the Polarities of Leadership

A polarity is a paradoxical situation in which two interdependent and seemingly contradictory states must be maintained for success over time. In business, leadership and life, we find ourselves presented by polarities all the time, often without even realising.

As leaders, we’re told that we must be great problem solvers. That’s true, but a polarity is not the same thing as a problem, for which a definitive solution can be reached at a given point in time. That’s why the ability to recognise when we are facing a polarity – otherwise known as a paradox, duality, dichotomy, tension, or wicked problem – can be a developmental leap for leaders. Embracing the polarites we face with a both/and mindset, as opposed to trying to solve them as problems with an either/or approach, opens up whole new ways forward.

In this article, we’ll meet a number of leaders who are facing polarities at work. We’ll focus on Shrupti, the founder and CEO of a crypto analytics business. We’ll unpack how she identified and navigated a polarity that was holding her leadership and business back. With these practical examples, you too will gain a greater understanding of how you can identify and work more effectively with polarities.

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4 Vertical leadership skills to help you thrive in a VUCA world

We live in Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous (VUCA) world. But what does that mean for you as a leader? Let’s explore how traditional horizontal approaches to leadership fall short and double down on the Vertical skills that leaders need to develop in order to make sense of and thrive in a VUCA world.

The book Upgrade: Building your capacity for complexity links VUCA with four leadership capacities that underpin Vertical skills:

  1. Sensemaking – Observing, understanding and processing the complexity of a situation e.g. getting your head around all the different interconnected topics, data, issues or causal relationships.
  2. Perspective-shifting – ‘Zooming out’ to benefit from a more realistic and multifaceted understanding of a situation or relationship e.g. understanding the perspectives and agendas of the various stakeholders.
  3. Self-relating – Observing, understanding, regulating and transforming yourself e.g. making sense of your own reactions, thoughts and feelings.
  4. Opposable Thinking – Responding to the dilemmas and conflicting ideas that can create tensions within us and / or between us and other people e.g. working with opposing views.
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5 challenges startup leadership teams face & how to avoid them

Your startup exploded out the blocks. Your metrics rose impressively. You bootstrapped your way to growth, or super-charged it with external funding. You’re growing fast… 15, 50, 150 people. The opportunity is still enormous, but your early agility is showing signs of strain. There’s challenges all around you. People are stressed. True team leadership is now needed, but it’s at this point that it so often fails.

Startup growth is never linear, it’s a rollercoaster, but similar challenges are observable on the ride. Written for CEOs and other leaders building their startup leadership team, this article identifies 5 common factors that cause problems for a team. I offer up some advice about how to navigate these challenges based on my experience helping leadership teams through this critical stage of growth.

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Beware the Illusion of Certainty

We like to think that our lives are ordered, predictable and subject to a great deal of control. The past is finite; we see only one outcome. We attach causality and narrative to it so that it makes sense. We roll our ability to make sense of the past over into the future, which is infinite; there are many outcomes, as yet unknown and unknowable. Randomness, chance, and luck influence us far more than we realize. Certainty is an illusion. Uncertainty is everywhere.

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How Women Rise: Break the 12 Habits Holding You Back – Summary

How Women Rise: Break the 12 Habits Holding You Back identifies 12 habits that commonly hold women leaders back as they endeavour to rise to the top of their chosen career. The book concludes with a practical section on how to put identified changes in habits in to action. This article provides a summary of the 12 habits that the authors, Sally Helgesen and Marshall Goldsmith, identify and adds some powerful questions you can ask yourself to unpack your own habits and unleash your full leadership potential.

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Why entrepreneurs need a coach, mentor & therapist

Like any high-performing individual, leaders need to wrap a professional support team around them if they are to give themselves the best chance of success. That team must be trustworthy, objective, and acting always in the leader’s best interests. This post unpacks the difference between a coach, mentor and therapist and explains why, together, they can make up a such a cohesive support team.

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How Vertical Development helps new leaders transform

To develop truly effective leaders we need to move beyond providing people with more information – telling them what to do and how to do it – to helping them improve how they think, make decisions, and make sense of the world. This is the distinction between horizontal development, which focuses on what you know, and Vertical Development, which concerns how you think:

Traditional horizontal development focuses on the acquisition of further knowledge, skills and development of specific personal qualities to become more proficient and experienced in a given aspect of leadership. By contrast, Vertical Development transforms the underlying capacity of the leader to make sense of and respond to situations, working directly on their internal ‘meaning making’, rather than just behaviours or actions. 

Vertical Development: building leadership capabilities for the future
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8 books all new leaders should read

“Why is it that when I ask for a pair of hands, a brain comes attached?” Henry Ford once asked. The capitalist economy of the last few centuries was built upon the work of men and machines. Men (and it was almost exclusively men) were paid to do, not to think. Command and control approaches to leadership prevailed, but these traditional approaches are outdated and ineffective. The way that businesses are built and led, and the future of work is changing: the world is more complex than it used to be and the best leaders are learning to adapt. To survive and grow in today’s volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) environment, leaders need skills and organisational capabilities that are different from those that helped businesses succeed in the past.

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Trillion Dollar Coach – Summary

Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Handbook of Silicon Valley’s Bill Campbell is a book about a man who helped build some of America’s greatest companies, including Apple and Google. A former college football player and coach, Bill didn’t enter the business world until he was thirty nine. Moving quickly though through executive roles, he went on to coach the likes of Steve Jobs, Larry Page, Eric Schmidt, Ben Horowitz and Bill Gurley, to name just a few. He passed away in 2016, leaving a legacy of growing companies, successful people and an enormous amount of respect. The book is essential reading for any manager or leader operating in a fast-moving, high growth business.

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How to avoid being duped by survivorship bias

It’s easy to see, and pay attention to, only successful individuals and businesses, not the failures that fall by the wayside. This phenomenon is called survivorship bias: “the logical error of concentrating on the people or things that made it past some selection process and overlooking those that did not, typically because of their lack of visibility.” (Wikipedia). This article explains, with examples, what survivorship bias is and how to avoid being duped by it.

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A collection of the best articles for new leaders

Many of my executive coaching clients are new leaders in startup and high growth technology businesses. They often find themselves thrust into a new leadership role without much previous experience or training to prepare them. The spotlight and responsibility of first-time leadership can be daunting but it is an incredible place to learn. As part of my executive and startup specific founder services, I curate a reading list of the most insightful leadership articles that I have discovered for clients to read and reflect on. From the thought provoking to the practical, here is a continually updated collection of the best articles which will help you grow and succeed in a new leadership role.

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12 of the best executive coaching books

Are you a manager or leader who wants to develop your coaching skills? Maybe you’re already a coach who wants to continue to develop personally and professionally? Here’s my list of books about executive coaching that have most influenced me.

More about me: I spent ten years at Deloitte Consulting and as a civil servant at HM Treasury. I moved into the technology sector in 2013 and became an executive coach shortly after. I work with founders, CEOs & executives in high-growth technology businesses & the investment industry.

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2 powerful ways to get better at coaching your employees

The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever is one of the best books I’ve read for managers and leaders who want to use a coach approach with their employees but don’t have the time or inclination for formal training. It’s short on theory but long on practical tools and techniques that are a shot to the heart of great coaching.

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Can technology save the American Dream? Lessons from Janesville

Successful businesses today must be technology-enabled and able to compete in a global marketplace. Older businesses must adapt or die. Janesville: An American Story by Amy Goldstein explores what happens to businesses that don’t adapt and the impact upon the places and individuals that get left behind. An insightful case study of a medical technology company that is incentivised to move to the town, raises the question of whether or not technology can save the American Dream: “the opportunity for prosperity and success, as well as an upward social mobility for the family and children, achieved through hard work in a society with few barriers” (Wikipedia).

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What is the impact of technology on babies & young children?

The evidence is irrefutable: the best way to help a baby learn to talk or develop any other cognitive skill is through live interaction with a human being. But what is the impact of technology on young children that are exposed to it? Can an app, an avatar or a 3D cartoon recreate or override human nature? If a child spends too much time being cyber-simulated than connecting with the real world, could it impair other important pre-academic skills such as empathy, social abilities and problem solving? What about a child who spends the bulk of their playtime with an interactive app, in which objects explode, appear, reappear, and don’t play by the rules of the physical world? How does looking at a tablet screen impact an infant’s eyesight?

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Ray Dalio identifies the 11 characteristics of visionary leaders

Ray Dalio’s book Principles: Life & Work identifies the author’s organically grown set of principles for building a successful life and business. According to Dalio, principles are fundamental truths that serve as the foundations for behaviour that get you what you want. Dalio also details the personal research he conducted into visionary leadership. Through interviews with the likes of Bill Gates, Reed Hastings, Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk, he identified the characteristics of visionary leaders. This post summarises his findings, with a particular focus on ‘shapers’, as Dalio refers to them.

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15 books that will make you wiser

My experience with cancer changed my relationship with reading and books. Needing to understand my illness better, I consumed every medical paper I could get my hands on. This knowledge helped me deal with my illness and make wiser decisions as part of my treatment process. If it could help me navigate my illness, could it help me navigate life in general? I transitioned to books about psychology, and then to books about the world around me. Two years of radiotherapy, chemotherapy and several operations means you have a lot of time on your hands!

Here’s my list of the books that made me wiser, and reshaped the way I think about the world.

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Victor Frankl on finding meaning & happiness

Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl is essential reading for anybody interested in happiness, personal growth, the psychology of suffering and mental health. It chronicles the author’s time as an inmate in the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II. The early chapters do not make for easy reading but the book opens up into one of the deepest and most eloquent explorations of finding meaning and man’s search for meaning and happiness.

Striving to find a meaning in one’s life is the primary motivational force in man… This meaning is unique and specific in that it must and can only be fulfilled by him alone; only then does it achieve a significance which will satisfy his own will to meaning.

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What is the difference between coaching & mentoring?

The words coaching and mentoring are often used interchangeably, though there are in fact important differences. In his book Coaching for Performance the late Sir John Whitmore, explains what the difference between coaching and mentoring is. Whitmore is the founder of the coaching movement in the UK. The book is widely considered to be the industry gold standard for performance based coaching.

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Superforecasting: The Art & Science of Prediction – Summary

Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction is a book about how to become a superforecaster, an often ordinary person who has an extraordinary ability to make predictions about the future with a degree of accuracy significantly greater than the average.

In a landmark study undertaken between 1984 and 2004, Wharton Professor Philip Tetlock showed that the average expert’s ability to make accurate predictions about the future was only slightly better than a layperson using random guesswork. His latest project, which began in 2011, has since shown that there are some people with real, demonstrable predicting foresight. In his book, co-authored with Dan Gardner, Tetlock identifies how you can become a superforecaster too. Read on for a summery of how.

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What is second-level thinking?

Howard Marks is the Chairman and cofounder of Oaktree Capital Management and author of The Most Important Thing: Uncommon Sense for the Thoughtful Investor. In the book, Marks explains why second-level thinking (sometimes referred to as second-order thinking) and being a contrarian is so important.

Let’s take a look at what second level-thinking really is and why mastering it is so important to anyone with investment and business interests, professional and personal.

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The strategic genius of John Boyd: “The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War”

Robert Coram, author of Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War describes John Boyd as “first, last and always a fighter pilot – a loud talking, cigar-smoking, bigger-than-life fighter pilot”. But also as more than that: “he was that rarest of creatures – a thinking fighter pilot.” Boyd is widely considered to be one of the world’s greatest military strategists, despite the fact that it’s unlikely you have ever heard of him. Over his career he bought the Air Force its Aerial Attack Study, invented Energy-Maneuverability (E-M) Theory, was the father of the F-15 and F-16 fighter jets and created a decision making framework called the OODA loop. His thinking about strategy spread across the US armed forces: his Patterns of Conflict briefing provided the basis for the US military’s strategy in the first Gulf War, leading to their 100 hour victory. It still underpins US Marine Corps fighting doctrine to this day.

John Boyd was an endearing eccentric and strategic genius who is brought wonderfully to life by author Robert Coram in his meticulously researched book. Coram demonstrates what one man, surrounded by a few devoted and loyal Acolytes, can do to change the world. Maneuverability, as it relates to military (and business) strategy, we learn is key. 

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Daniel Kahneman on the cognitive biases of entrepreneurs

Thinking Fast and Slow is a book about biases of intuition. It’s ideas are so potent that they won it’s author Danuel Kahneman a Nobel in economics. Kahneman identifies that the human brain works very well most of the time and our judgments are sound. However, it is prone to engage in a number of fallacies and systematic errors that lead to flawed opinions and adverse decision making, otherwise known as cognitive biases. We assume certain things automatically without having thought them through carefully. Kahneman calls these assumptions heuristics and, for entrepreneurs, they can be deadly. An awareness of them is the first step to countering them.

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The best business & leadership quotes from ‘Shoe Dog’ by Phil Knight

Phil Knight is the founder, former CEO and now Executive Chairman of Nike. In Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike he tells his story of taking the business from humble origins, through an IPO in 1980 and onto its current $30 billion market capitalisation.

Nike is still widely regarded to be one of the most innovative companies in the world. Phil Knight started and grew the business out of the back of a van in the early 1970s. A Stanford graduate, avid reader of the Classics and books about military strategy, and a natural introvert, he captures a wonderful story about what he calls his Crazy Idea and the determination and grit it takes to become successful beyond what he’d ever imagined. In Shoe Dog, he also includes some wonderful accounts of the hustle and sometimes downright dirty tactics that it can take to overcome the odds: “you are remembered for the rules you break” is his mantra throughout the book. I’ve captured the best of the rest of his business and leadership wisdom in the quotes from the book below.

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Yuval Harari explains the Capitalist Creed

Yuval Harari’s book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind charts our origins from hunter gatherers 2.5 million years ago on to the rise of Homo Sapiens 200,000 years ago. He takes the reader through the Cognitive Revolution 70,000 years ago, the Agrarian Revolution 10,000 years ago, into the Scientific Revolution in the 1500s, the Industrial Revolution in the late 1700s and on to the present. Harari covers a lot of ground that includes a deep dive into capitalism: “an economic-led system based on private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit”. He explores how something that began as a theory about how the early economy of the modern age functioned, has grown into much more than an economic doctrine.

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ANOTHER post about what’s WRONG with The Lean Startup

The Lean Startup, by Eric Ries, was first published in 2011 and has since become the bible for startup entrepreneurs around the world. More recently, the approach outlined in The Lean Startup has received criticism, but is that fair? In this post I argue that it is not, because that is all it is, an approach, albeit a very good one. 

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