Speaking

I spend much of my working life dealing with questions about leadership, ambition, change and other people. Writing and recovery have given me different ways of thinking about many of those questions, while running a global business gives me somewhere to find out whether any of those ideas survive contact with reality.

Those are the conversations I’m interested in bringing into a room. Not because I think I’ve found a perfect way to lead, succeed or navigate change, but because I’ve spent a long time experiencing those things from several different perspectives and have become fascinated by what happens underneath them.

Rethinking Success

We tend to talk about success as though the difficult part is achieving it. We spend considerably less time talking about what happens when we do, particularly when the things we worked towards still matter but no longer mean quite what they once did.

I remain ambitious, care enormously about my work and enjoy achieving things, so this isn’t an argument for abandoning conventional ideas of success in favour of some supposedly more enlightened existence. It is a conversation about how our relationship with success changes as we do, what happens when achievement starts doing more emotional work than we realise, and whether we can continue wanting more without requiring the next accomplishment to tell us who we are.

Depending on the audience, this can move through ambition, identity, purpose, career progression and the sometimes uncomfortable experience of discovering that something can still be working while no longer fitting in quite the same way.

A stone terrace beside a dark building, looking across a calm sea toward distant mountains in low sunlight.

Leadership Without Losing the Human Bit

Most leadership happens in situations involving other people, which is unfortunate because other people have an irritating tendency to be complicated.

They bring their own ambitions, insecurities, expectations, histories and ways of seeing the world into work, and so do we. We can have the right organisational structure, a perfectly sensible strategy and an impressive collection of leadership principles, then discover that none of those things makes a difficult conversation particularly easy or prevents us reacting badly when we feel threatened, ignored or uncertain.

I’m interested in leadership from that perspective. How much of the way we lead is actually about the people in front of us, and how much is about our own relationship with control, recognition, responsibility and uncertainty? What does accountability look like when it applies to us as well as everybody else? And how do we create environments where people can disagree, make mistakes and remain human without lowering the standards we expect from them?

I don’t think humanity and performance are competing ideas. In my experience, understanding the former usually gives us a considerably better chance of achieving the latter.

A concrete pavilion and still pool beside a rocky shore, opening onto the sea under a cloudy sky.

What Recovery Taught Me About Change

I didn’t get sober because I was looking for a new philosophy of leadership or personal development. I got sober because I needed to stop drinking. What surprised me was how useful many of the things I learned afterwards became in parts of my life that had absolutely nothing to do with alcohol.

Recovery forced me to think differently about acceptance, honesty, accountability, willingness, control and the uncomfortable gap between knowing something needs to change and actually changing it. Those ideas eventually became the starting point for 12 Steps to Successful Leadership and 12 Steps to Success: Finding Your Purpose, because I became increasingly convinced that we shouldn’t need to wait until our lives fall apart before some of these principles become useful.

This conversation isn’t about addiction unless that is what an audience specifically wants to explore. It is about change and why we can find it so difficult even when we know it might be good for us: recognising what is actually within our control, taking responsibility without turning that into self-punishment and making changes without pretending we can know exactly where they will lead.

Rocky foreground above a chain of lakes, with low cloud crossing the mountains and sunlight breaking through.

Formats

I speak in a range of settings, including keynotes, fireside chats, panels and moderation, workshops and podcasts. The format matters less to me than the conversation, and I’m happy to shape the subject around the audience rather than deliver exactly the same talk regardless of who happens to be sitting in front of me.

I’m slightly wary of anybody who talks about leadership or success as though they have managed to solve either of them. I certainly haven’t. The most interesting conversations, for me, are the ones that leave enough room for complexity. Success can be worth wanting without being the answer to everything. Leadership can require high standards while still allowing people to be human. Change can be necessary without everything that came before it having been a mistake.

If that sounds like a conversation that might be useful for your audience, I’d be happy to hear what you’re planning and see whether I might be a good fit.

Talk to me about an event