I have treated the Christmas holiday break as would an aging bear preparing for winter. I have laid down a sustaining layer of subcutaneous fat and would like to offer…
Dominic Cummings has, for now, left his role as the Prime Minister’s controversial senior advisor. Much will be written, a lot of it by Mr Cummings himself. It may never…
An animated conversation between friends about our favourite bands is often a joyful distraction revealing our long lost teenage tribes. It can also mean stepping into perilous conversations about fashion,…
“Come in, sit down, I’ll be with you in a moment, I’m just finishing a letter.” He stood framed by a bay window, his back to me, silhouetted against the…
The meeting room was full of noise. Silence looked in, but she knew silence would not be welcome. She therefore waited quietly outside just in case silence was needed. She…
The existential questions come thick and fast. They can be interesting and sometimes energising, but I am not always sure they help us. I think they mostly distract us. We…
If the weakness in your argument is the place you linger when others have moved on… If the shortcomings you perceive in your experience cast a shadow over your confidence…
As a teenager I might not have been the edgiest individual you could meet. My record collection included ELO and the Carpenters. In the 5th form I went to a…
An odd question I heard someone ask this week was “if your house was on fire, and all people and pets were safe, what one possession would you hope could…
It was twenty years ago today, on 12 September 2000, that a thirty-eight-year-old lawyer and recently former General Counsel of two different financial institutions bubble-wrapped his career and left it…
Why do so many leaders allude to feelings of loneliness in their roles? Is there an expectation that stepping into such roles there will be times when the weight of…
Talk of a Covid silver-lining risks being completely insensitive to the hardships, and grieving, that many individuals, families and communities have suffered and continue to suffer. I do not want…
12 August 1960. Somewhere on some hillside, a grouse came face to face for the first time with a seemingly stubborn and immoveable force. Feathers flew. The “Glorious Twelfth” marks…
This week I had some meetings in London. A carriage to myself into Paddington, a station concourse with more staff than passengers, a tube journey where there were so many…
There are some well-worn clichés about success and failure. “We learn most from our mistakes”, is perhaps one of the best known, while Kipling’s poem “If” is the totemic ballast…
The penny dropped one day over a beer with my co-founder, Lawrence Smith. For those of you who may not know him, Lawrence is the inspiration for 90% of what…
“What are you thinking?” “Nothing.” “No, really, what are you thinking?” “Really, nothing.” There are moments in the day when I have no purpose. I am inert. I think it…
This post is inspired by a conversation I had on Friday with a lawyer who told me of such a gruelling story that I have hardly thought of anything else…
The triangle is the least consequential instrument in the school orchestra. The tool for the last one picked. A way to include everyone and to exclude no-one. It is a…
I have long railed against the term “Trusted Advisor”. I think it verges on meaningless self-aggrandisement which flatters the title holder, but mystifies our colleagues who are not lawyers, while…
…on a building site near you an animated discussion starts to get even more heated. “I’m telling you every building site owner is going to replace their labourers with robot…
Dear General Counsel, Please forgive my impertinence in writing to you this evening. I would like to draw your attention to a report by Professor Stephen Mayson entitled “Reforming Legal…
What should we require of our leaders in a post-pandemic professional services business? In this note I share my thoughts on what I hope leadership can mean at this time,…
“Pick it up” said the teacher, exasperation furrowing her brow and losing patience through every pore of her being, like boiling cabbage water draining from a colander. “But it wasn’t…
At the end of March 2020, the UK finally went into a formal lockdown. Schools closed, offices emptied, and the skies were left for the birds. Linked-in filled up with…
Are you good at change? Comfortable with change? Or are you change resistant? Don’t people bang on about change? Nothing should change. Everything should change. Something should change. But what…
The most important space between us is not a physical distance, but how closely we are prepared to align our vulnerabilities. To embrace an idea shared with us, is to…
Crumble is not a lawyer. She is not “C-Suite experienced”. Neither is she a “dynamic, commercial, self-starting Executive with a track-record of transformational achievement”. She is a four-year old cockerpoo.…
It is Mental Health Awareness Week in the UK, and I would like to write something positive and encouraging about mental health and wellbeing. In 2016 I wrote about being…
My first joyful encounter with performance management was the Balanced Score Card. An evolution of the “tick-box” nursery school of management theory. The process required external consultants to describe value…
Please forgive this indulgence. A departure from my ranty blogging. This is a poem I have written to reflect some of the very many mentoring calls I have had in…
Paradigm Shift is not an over-the-counter laxative. However, I do encourage you to think of it as a highly effective turdilogical expellant next time it is used in an executive…
…what next then? Amid much chatter about new normals and paradigms shifting, how will we relate to what happens next? Who to believe and who to follow? I suspect two…
It’s not easy, is it? I’m afraid I don’t have any advice on “ten Tibetan dialects to discover in your new found spare time” or “using Zoom to learn how…
I am delighted to share this guest post by the wonderful Justin Featherstone MC. Justin is a mainstay of our LBCambridge and LBCambridge2 programmes. He is a brilliant communicator and…
…Not everything is an opportunity. Not everyone has time to pause. Sometimes I feel it is too hard to be positive, too frightening to be brave and too uncertain to…
It is a time like no other for everyone. We are all grappling with the loss of normality and the shock of sudden change. I realise, of course, that what…
The last two weeks have been a little disconcerting. We have cancelled our residential events, connecting with delegates and presenters and venues and supporters to offer reassuring messages as best…
This is a hypothetical story. It is about a company, its Chief Executive and the General Counsel. It is not about right or wrong, compliance or non-compliance; but it is…
I was once told with cold detachment, by a senior colleague with a generation of experience more than mine, that I was the biggest recruitment mistake the firm had ever…
It has been said before that politicians campaign in poetry and govern in prose. First there is the soaring optimistic rhetoric of a great slogan or an impassioned speech, galvanising…
When two wonderful pieces of music are played over each other the clashing, jarring noise that is the result, ruins both and leaves us anxious for the sound to be…
“What is this?” said the hamster with slightly weary irritation. “It is hamster wheel” said the 5-star innovation czar (V.P. EMEA and Asia Pac hamster wheel division) “I have one…
It is hard to follow politics and not feel disconnected. This is an odd phenomenon in our 24/7 news channel, social media, multi-channel, multi-platform, your-call-is-important-to-us world. Politics on social media…
Five hundred words and ten things EVERY legal department can do to be more valuable for their organisations and for themselves: Have the clearest possible statement of what the team…
There are some big workplace structural inadequacies that still hang in the air; inadequacies that my generation has so far failed to nail down. They include the gender pay gap,…
