The ones nobody considered

Betrayal, I always assumed, required intent. Someone decides to act against you, and does. The Manchester City verdict changed my mind. Guilty on 114 of 115 financial charges. What stayed with me wasn’t the legal detail. It was the stands. The fathers who passed...

Chasing the next song

A handwritten note. That’s how it started. Fifty years ago this week, a 14-year-old drummer named Larry Mullen Jr. pinned “Drummer Seeks Musicians To Form Band” to a noticeboard at Mount Temple in Dublin. Four teenagers turned up in his kitchen. Bono...

Escaping to focus

Every hard project reaches a moment when pushing stops working. We push anyway. More hours. More meetings. Another pass at the same spreadsheet. We tell ourselves the only alternative to perseverance is quitting, so we grind, and the problem stays exactly where it...

The wrong game

Chess is a beautiful lie. Two players. Perfect information. No hidden hands, no shifting alliances, no one bluffing about the state of the market. Business doesn’t work that way. The F1 team runs the sim because the track never gives you all the data at once....

The third kind of leader

In an age of disinformation, some leaders play on faith. Others assume everyone can be fooled. We rarely talk about the third kind: the one who treats us with the respect we deserve. Truth isn’t their strategy. It’s the floor....