Battling with Business

In this week’s episode we conclude our two part exploration of Xi Jinping and examine what he has done with power once he reached the top of the Chinese Communist Party. We explore the enormous scale of the Belt and Road Initiative and ask whether it is a masterclass in long term strategic thinking, a tool of geopolitical influence, or both. We also tackle some of the most difficult and controversial aspects of ...

In this week’s episode we start a new Influencers series by turning our attention to one of the most important and least understood leaders in the world, politician Xi Jinping, General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party. We explore how China’s rise from relative isolation to global superpower has changed the balance of power around the world and why so many people in the West still underestimate both...

In this week's episode we dive into systems thinking and why so many of the problems we complain about in business, government and everyday life are far more connected than they first appear.

We explore why seemingly simple frustrations like potholes, missed deadlines or poor customer service are often symptoms of much larger systems working exactly as they were designed to work. Gareth brings his milita...

In this week's episode we take on a question that feels increasingly uncomfortable in today's climate. Have we been getting it wrong when we've talked about what makes great leaders and leadership? If you watch the news you might be forgiven for thinking that empathy and psychological safety are dead and the old ways of leading are just hippy constructs. Might makes right and all you need to do is just to tell peopl...

In this week’s episode we take on one of the most uncomfortable realities in leadership and management: what do you do when the problem is your boss? We move beyond the easy label of a “bad boss” and unpack what that actually means in practice, from incompetence and misaligned incentives through to absentee leadership, toxic behaviours and micromanagement. The conversation quickly reveals that this i...

In this week’s episode we dive into one of the most extraordinary leadership stories ever told as part of our Influencers series, exploring the life and decisions of Ernest Shackleton. What starts as a failed expedition to cross Antarctica becomes something far more compelling. It becomes a masterclass in leadership under extreme pressure, where survival replaces ambition and every decision carries life or death...

In this week’s episode we continue our exploration of the second in command and why this role is often the difference between a team that performs and one that quietly struggles. If leadership is usually framed around the person at the top, this conversation flips that idea and focuses on the individual who makes leadership actually work in practice.

We build directly on part one by moving beyond w...

In this week’s episode we tackle one of the most critical and least discussed roles in leadership and management: the second in command. It is the role that frequently and quietly determines whether strategy actually turns into results, and yet almost nobody talks about it. This is the first of two episodes where we break this down and take a deep dive into the topic.

We explore what a 2ic really d...

In this week's episode we get into a question that sits at the heart of leadership but is often misunderstood in practice. Are we actually being strategic, or are we just very busy executing tactics and convincing ourselves that progress equals success? Using the unfolding situation in the Middle East as a live case study, we challenge ourselves to separate activity from intent and to ask what success really looks like when the env...

In this week’s episode we explore what really drives resilience, leadership, and high performance when everything is on the line. What happens when ordinary people, just like you or me, are placed in extraordinary circumstances and there is no escape from the team, the pressure, or the goal?

We sit down with Felicity Ashley, a mother of three and former marketing leader who decided while recovering...

In this week’s episode we explore a deceptively simple idea that reshaped the modern world. We tell the story of Malcom McLean and the rise of the shipping container, not as a tale of invention, but as a masterclass in leadership, systems thinking, and the real impact of change.

We start by stepping back into a world where global trade was slow, fragile, and expensive. Goods were moved by hand, por...

In this week’s episode we continue our two part series exploring one of the most unusual leadership problems imaginable. How do you prepare an organisation or even an entire country for something that everyone hopes will never actually happen.

In the previous episode we introduced the idea of the British Government War Book, a set of detailed plans created to guide the country through the first cha...

In this week’s episode we start the first of a two part series looking at how people plan for events that they hope will never actually happen.

The story begins with a visit to the National Archives at Kew where Chris spent time reading declassified documents about real British wartime planning that started just after the First World War and continued late into the Cold War. This plan, the British ...

In this week’s episode we explore a simple but uncomfortable truth about leadership: pressure is the point. It is not something to be avoided, minimised or delegated away. It is the arena in which performance is revealed.

We sat down with Simon Jeffries, a former Special Boat Service operator turned mindset and performance coach, to unpack what elite military environments can teach leaders in busin...

In this week’s episode, re-released from the heady early days of the podcast in 2023, we tackle a question that sits at the heart of leadership and management: how do you move from a bold vision to meaningful action? It is easy to talk about strategy. It is much harder to create a clear destination that inspires people and then connect it to what people are actually doing on a Monday morning.

We ex...

This week we revisit, as a re-released episode, one of the most controversial figures in political and leadership thinking as part of our Influencers series. We ask a simple but uncomfortable question. Do good leaders sometimes have to do bad things? It seems particularly relevant given the world around us today.

We return to Niccolo Machiavelli and explore whether he truly deserves his reputation as the...

In this week’s episode we conclude our three part series on AI by tackling one of the most uncomfortable and important questions of all: surveillance, control and the future of decision making.

If AI can see more than we can, interpret more than we can and act faster than we can, what does that mean for leaders, managers and the societies we operate in? Are we witnessing a natural evolution of tool...

In this week’s episode we continue our exploration of what it really means to lead and manage in a world increasingly shaped by AI. Rather than asking whether AI is good or bad, we focus on a harder and more important question: how leadership, culture, trust and experience change when intelligent systems begin to make decisions alongside us, or instead of us.

We reflect on how quickly AI is moving ...

In this week's episode we start a new mini series by asking a question that sits underneath all the noise about artificial intelligence and jobs.

What does leadership and management actually mean when AI becomes a permanent participant in how organisations think, decide, and act?

Rather than debating whether AI is good or bad, we focus on the practical reality that it is already here and al...