Essays · 40 pieces
Essays on strategy, corporate finance, and technology.
Written from a career spent advising and running large companies.
Education for a world of abundant intelligence
When intelligence is abundant, the bottleneck stops being knowledge and becomes judgment, and judgment can be deliberately built.
Consuming the inheritance
Britain, the depreciation thesis, and the transition from inheritance to earning.
Private credit dislocation
A global infrastructure financing risk assessment.
Adoption-first design in consumer and enterprise systems
Scale is governed by adoption, not architecture, and consumer systems demand the opposite design order to enterprise ones.
Equity positioning in an age of permissioned levitation
When markets are priced by narrow credit spreads rather than cash flows, the risk is not recession but revocation.
Strategy in an age of permission
Markets switch between permissioned and non-permissioned regimes, and most strategic failure is misreading which one you are in.
Why beating the market and gross margin expansion rarely go together
Taking share and expanding gross margins together demands an advantage that is specific, durable and funded; without it, the plan is just ambition in Excel.
Delivering value creation
An operating model specified to the mechanism, where the build is funded from the oxygen the existing business releases.
When vision is owed
A public company runs on two surfaces, perception and economics, and strategy is the discipline of keeping them coupled.
The end of the stack
Enterprise IT architecture when integration is free.
The leadership myths we hire for
We mythologise leaders as visionaries, but what companies actually need is someone to make hard choices and hold their nerve.
The forgotten infrastructure of intelligence
Why the AI future rests on the network.
An open letter to new CEOs: leading from the dividend floor
Why a show-me stock should be run from the dividend it can bank, not the consensus it cannot.
The two myths that broke corporate finance
How the DCF and Modigliani–Miller, taught as scripture, became the superstitions that launder optimism and breed corporate stagnation.
The ten rules of corporate finance
Ten rules for treating cash as truth, debt as a lever, and the dividend as the meal.
Convertible notes: the missing muscle in corporate partnerships
Big companies are built to acquire and control, not to partner; convertible notes rebuild the muscle for sharing risk and upside.
Frame it, prove it, get out of the way
Organisations are tribes that trust what they see, so execution runs on proof, not PowerPoint.
You don't shift culture: you swap it in
Why 30% of your top team needs to change before anything else can.
Inclusion as renewal: throwing open the windows
Inclusion is not charity but governance's term limit: the corporate substitute for elections that stops the boardroom choking on its own past.
Leaders don't build pipelines. They carry posses
Succession is not a pipeline of anonymous candidates; it is a posse forged in battle and trusted under fire.
There are no fibre laggards, just lazy analysis
Fibre league tables mostly rank geography wearing a badge of competence; the missing character is context.
The right to click: why making internet access a human right isn't just a noble idea, but a regulatory earthquake
Calling internet access a human right turns a slogan into a state obligation, and ends two decades of market-first regulation.
When your infrastructure became sovereign
AI has made the pipes political: your cloud is someone's arsenal, your network someone's border, and strategy can no longer float above the battlefield.
Give me a CEO with a spine, not a slogan
Vision flatters, strategy bites; if no one bristles, it is not strategy, it is wallpaper.
The vanity of brands in the land of indifference
In low-interest categories a brand is plumbing, not religion: it can buy recall and a sliver of pricing power, but never love.
The cloud is a furnace
The weightless cloud is concrete, steel and kilowatts, and the company that treats its energy as PR will face the reckoning.
Augmented, not automated
AI should accelerate the executive's judgement, not replace it: augmentation without abdication.
When "as-a-service" is just debt in disguise
Without pooled, multi-tenant infrastructure, "as-a-service" is not a service but financing dressed as one.
Growth isn't born in the boardroom
Real growth begins in customers, not slide decks; inflating the map never moves the mountain.
Open RAN's governance vacuum: why architecture without accountability fails
Open RAN opened the architecture but fragmented accountability, and the quest for sovereign control created a sovereignty vacuum.
Customer emotional debt: the strategic risk you're not forecasting
Customers do not stay for value alone but for how it feels to receive it, and for the debt that builds when that feeling breaks.
Global shocks, local insanities: the two ways supply chains fail
Supply chains fail two ways: the geopolitical thunderclap, and the quiet waste accumulating in your own storeroom.
How revenue recognition games inflate bonuses, and how to stop them
How the elastic in IFRS 15 lets companies book tomorrow's revenue today, flatter the P&L, and pay the bonuses now.
Lead with governance: the integration lesson most companies learn too late
What the BT and EE integration taught: if you do not change the reporting lines, you have not changed anything.
When the market was wrong and the customer was right
A lesson in customer obsession, learned the hard way.
The internet in the rain
The internet does not float; it lives in mud and midnight call-outs, and copper service levels are engineered to disappoint until fibre replaces them.
Simple corporate finance rules for strategists
A practitioner's rules of thumb for valuation, capital and allocation, stripped of false precision.
The missing operating system behind strategy execution
Strategy fails in the operating rhythm, not the boardroom; a fixed set of conversations to anchor scattered leadership attention.
The best training Booz ever paid for
How a strategy firm tried to learn empathy through neuroscience, and the two tools that rewired how I lead.
Ten years a consultant: what I took, what I left
What a decade in strategy consulting gave me, and what it could not: how to advise is not how to decide.