Leadership, commercial strategy and business growth insights

Meadows argues that we fixate on individual events or parts when the real answer sits in the relationships between them. A system is more than the sum of its parts. Change one element and you create consequences somewhere else, some intended, some not. The better question isn't what is happening, but what is creating the conditions for it to happen.

In a fulfilment operation, high-quality cardboard from our main client was being treated as waste and sent to the baler. Instead of managing it as a waste problem, we looked at the wider system and asked where the resource could create value. We diverted the boxes and sold them for reuse, repurposing 250 pallets and helping save more than 600,000 litres of water in six months, then reinvested the proceeds back into the team's working environment.

From research into more than 2,600 CEOs, Botelho and Powell found that decisive leaders aren't the ones with the most information. They're better at triage: working out quickly what needs deciding now, what can wait, and what isn't theirs to decide at all. Decisiveness isn't about speed. It's about refusing to let uncertainty bring everything to a standstill.

When a company I worked for put in an offer to acquire a DTC business, every project on our own eCommerce build was paused while we waited to see whether the deal would go through. Rather than let one uncertain decision stop everything, I reframed the key projects so they could continue at a lower intensity. The acquisition fell through a few months later, and because we hadn't waited for certainty, we hadn't lost the progress we would otherwise have needed to make up.

Most businesses have a small number of highly profitable customers, products or channels, and a much larger number that quietly lose money. Byrne calls the profitable slice the "islands of profit", sitting in a "sea of red ink". Growing revenue without knowing which is which just means growing the losses faster.

I used this thinking directly in a previous role to help shape client decisions, mapping profitability down to the customer and product level rather than trusting the top line, then making deliberate calls about where to invest, where to hold, and where to walk away.

Grant's argument is that innate talent is overrated. What actually predicts long-term success is a set of character skills, proactivity, discipline, determination, and the willingness to be a "sponge" for feedback, and these rarely show up on a CV. In one striking study, children who developed these habits early went on to outperform higher-scoring peers decades later, regardless of where they started.

I've used this thinking to change how we assess candidates when recruiting, looking for evidence of trajectory and effort rather than just the polish of a CV or the prestige of a previous employer. Someone who has improved fast from a difficult start is often a better bet than someone who arrived already finished.

Hardy's argument is that success is almost never the result of one big decision. It comes from small, smart choices repeated consistently over time, choices so minor they're easy to dismiss, until the compounding catches up. His formula is blunt: small, smart choices, plus consistency, plus time, equals a radical difference.

I used this thinking to find small, practical ways to manage waste in the business. On their own, none of them looked significant. Over time, they compounded into a whole waste ecosystem, one that became the operational backbone underpinning our ISO 14001 accreditation.

Pink's case is that carrot-and-stick motivation only works for simple, mechanical tasks. For anything requiring judgement, care or creativity, people are driven by three things instead: autonomy, mastery and purpose. Give people real control over their work and they outperform any bonus scheme.

I built a hands-on exercise for warehouse Team Leaders around this, giving them real autonomy to choose where to focus their attention each day rather than follow a fixed checklist, then coaching them to use that choice to lead their teams towards better, more consistent results.

Syed's comparison is aviation versus healthcare. Aviation treats every failure as data and investigates it openly, which is why flying keeps getting safer. Many other industries hide failure instead, so the same mistakes happen again. The argument is blunt: you either learn from failure or you repeat it.

I've built this into post-project reviews, most usefully after peak season, so the lessons from one cycle actually change how we plan the next one instead of getting lost once the pressure is off.

Covey's case is that lasting effectiveness is built from the inside out, through character and habit, not technique. Two habits do most of the work: seeking to understand before being understood, and looking for a third alternative when two people seem to disagree. There is usually a better option than either side's starting position.

I try to practise all seven, but it's the listening and the third alternative that show up most in board and founder conversations, along with making time to sharpen the saw rather than running on empty.

The Heaths set out four ways decisions quietly go wrong, from narrow framing to short-term emotion, and offer a simple counter called WRAP: widen your options, reality-test your assumptions, attain distance before deciding, and prepare to be wrong. Most bad decisions come from a narrower set of options than the situation actually allows.

Before any major call, personal or professional, I push to widen the options on the table first and stay alert to the biases that narrow thinking without anyone noticing.