Last weekend I entered my first running race in 13 years. I was curious what the passage of time had done to my race speed over ten miles and my resilience when running at pace. I remember the 2010 race well. I started the race running as fast as I…

If you leave a boat in seawater for too long, barnacles will start attaching and growing. They glue themselves to the hull of your boat with a glue six times stronger than any human-made adhesive. As those barnacles accumulate they start to have an effect. It’s not immediately obvious but…

Power tripping. Power games. Power hungry. All too often we talk about power negatively in businesses. But how we can use power to achieve growth goals is an opportunity for scaling businesses. Businesses are complex systems. And power is our capacity to move energy through that organisational system. (h/t to…

The TL:DR How your business is organised is at the core of creating sustainable growth. It probably needs more focus than you give it. Businesses are usually built to thrive and grow. The pursuit of profit, and increasingly wider societal benefits, is at the heart of a capitalist system. At…

December’s definitely been a month of two distinct periods for me. The run-up to my last day at TPXimpact on 16th December was a particularly intense time. I did a lot of trying to wrap up loose ends and making sure I’d handed things over properly while also giving myself…

I’ve been writing monthnotes for more than three years now. Some months the memories just flow and the words come easily. But other months, including this one, it can be hard to grind out the words that adequately reflect my experiences over the preceding weeks. At work, October’s been a…

Looking back at the past four weeks, it’s been a bit of a disjointed month. The first week we were on holiday, enjoying time as a family in British Columbia, Canada. That was swiftly followed by an overnight flight back to the UK and returning to work at TPXimpact. It’s…

July shaped up to be an interesting month in my work at TPXimpact. It felt somewhat like another watershed in the journey of change from being a holding company with more than ten operating businesses to becoming an integrated business. In the middle of the month we announced our preliminary…

I was at a party last weekend and someone asked me what I did. I gave the obvious shortcut answer and told them my job title. Not surprisingly they then asked what that really meant I did. And that was a much harder thing to explain. I’m not convinced I…