I help leaders burn the playbook and build something impossible to copy. Conviction over consensus. Design for advantage, not approval.
England
Joined October 2008
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In August I engaged a designer to help me think through a user journey.
I've known him for years. Our paths have crossed plenty. He's very good at what he does.
We did it on a video call, me at my desk with pen and paper, because analog first is a mantra at lifestack, the company I co-founded. Partway through I asked him to look at the last five emails he'd sent and the last few photos on his phone. Then I asked him where he wanted to be and what he actually enjoyed.
He talked about his children. His partner. And the relationships he builds with clients, which he genuinely loves.
Then we did his arithmetic.
He charges for a 45-minute call. Before it, he spends an hour planning what he wants to land and what he needs to get out of it. After it, he spends another hour writing it all up, organised so it reads as though it was written for that person and nobody else. Which it was.
That's three hours. In reality it's five or six, because if he has a call next week he carries it around all week, jotting things down.
His client sees 45 minutes.
And then he stopped talking. The pause went on longer than pauses usually do. Because he'd worked out that the effort wasn't only invisible to his clients.
It was invisible to him.
He wasn't hiding it. He just hadn't looked.
I wasn't telling him to put his prices up. The hidden hours are the reason the visible 45 minutes are so good. The invisible work isn't the cost of the job. It's the job.
But work you've never counted is work you can't defend. So it comes out of wherever there's slack. The evening. The Sunday. The hour you'd promised to someone else.
And if you're doing this, the people closest to you already know. You're the last to find out.
You can't protect time you've never admitted you're spending.
Invisible work disguises itself as virtue.
That's the trap.
The hours you never count are the hours that feel most like who you are.
So you don't question them.
You can't protect time you've never admitted you're spending.
Capacity is the prerequisite, not the reward.
You can't deploy trust, taste, judgement, or relationships without it. And you can't build it while you're running on fumes.
Capacity isn't the reward you get when the business is running properly.
It's the prerequisite. The first thing. The condition without which nothing else holds.
Most of the personal development industry has this backwards.
It tells you to be more present, sleep better, lead with more empathy.
Every one of those is a downstream effect of having capacity to spend on it.
I am a high-functioning introvert.
Two days of being on costs me three days of being good for nothing.
The math is brutal. It doesn't improve with practice.
This is the small version of a pattern I see in almost every operator I work with.
The work demands a version of you that you can produce. You produce it. Then you spend the rest of your life paying the surcharge.
Leonardo da Vinci sketched helicopters by candlelight. What would he build with AI, CRISPR, and the entire internet at his fingertips?
My bet: something that makes us feel embarrassed about how we're using them.
Publishing something tomorrow that's been brewing for months.
It starts with: "The HR Business Partner role is dead."
And I mean it.
🧵 incoming Thursday AM.
I've been sitting on an argument that's going to upset a lot of HR professionals.
Publishing it tomorrow.
Here's the setup 🧵
Tomorrow I'm publishing my full thesis:
The HRBP Is Dead.
Long Live the Capability Architect, the Human Sensor, and the Wisdom Keeper.
Three capabilities that replace the generalist.
Not evolution. Fracture.
Working harder isn't going to change the maths.
Build assets that generate value. Assets that don't care if you're at your desk or on a beach.