I write occasionally. Not guides. More like things I first had to admit to myself, and that usually go unsaid in boardrooms.
These notes are written for those who make time to think. If now isn’t the right moment, come back when it is.
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Why Many Change Programmes Fail Before They Start
I looked back at our own projects over the past six years. Not the successful ones. The ones that didn’t deliver what they should have. I was looking for a pattern and I found it faster than I expected: The project plans were fine, the teams were fine, and so was the product. The change fell…
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Five letters pilots use when things go wrong. Why do we need five meetings?
DODAR is a crisis framework from aviation. It takes a pilot a few seconds. In most companies, the same process takes weeks, and still skips the two steps that actually matter. When something goes wrong in a cockpit, pilots don’t improvise. They run a sequence. It’s called DODAR – five steps that turn a problem…
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Who Builds the Roads Decides Where You Go
Infocracy, the architecture of choice, and four lines of digital defence You reach for your phone in the morning to check the weather. Twenty minutes later you have no idea how you ended up going from 18 degrees Celsius and a 15 km/h northwest wind to elevated blood pressure from the opinions of a politician…
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178 seconds to live.
Not a metaphor. It’s one of the numbers that came out of a real study. The goal was to test how successfully pilots could be taught a specific escape technique under difficult conditions. In 1954, the University of Illinois took 20 volunteer pilots. Ordinary VFR pilots, zero instrument flying experience. One by one, they were…
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Your First Filter Is Broken. Stop Playing a 1995 Game.
Now honestly. What is the point of a CV today? Is it a skills test? Is it testing how well the candidate can prompt an AI to polish their work history to fool an ATS robot into thinking they’re the perfect fit? Because that’s what it’s becoming. A game between the candidate’s AI and the…
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Motivation Is a Con. And You Already Know It.
Motivation is a feeling. Feelings are like weather.
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No Problem is The Problem
A startup doesn’t begin with a product. It begins with a problem. Last week I agreed to a discovery call. Founders, full of energy, with a polished presentation. Within five minutes I understood the point of the whole meeting: “We have a solution. We’re looking for a problem to solve with it.” (Enthusiasm is essential…
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Speed without direction is just speed.
Speed without direction is not progress. Physicists distinguish between speed and velocity: speed is scalar (how many kilometres per hour you are moving, while velocity is a vector, meaning it includes direction. In Slovak, we have just one word for both (“speed”), and perhaps it is here, in language and in thinking, that we make…
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Goal or wishful thinking?
Earlier today I sat in Martin’s meeting room; first time there, as an observer and would-be consultant. “We’ll improve customer satisfaction.” “This year we’ll finally fix internal communication.” Sounds good. Not so good when it gets called a “goal” in a monthly meeting. Martin, an SMB owner, dressed up his wishful thinking and called it…
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Before You Open The Laptop
Last week I handed a client a working system. It calculates prices. Something that used to take two people, spreadsheets, and a phone call now takes seconds. Clean. Reliable. Done. On my way home, I opened my Moleskine and jotted what bothered me about it: Not the system, the system works. What bothered me was…
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Result vs. Performance
Take two managers. Each has a five-person team. Both delivered a result of 500 this quarter. Same number, same bonus, same feedback from leadership: “Good work.” One has a star on his team. Peter, who runs at 135% and carries the whole number on his own. The rest of the team fluctuates – someone at…
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The First Button
This morning I did up the first button wrong (first day back from holiday 🤷🏻♂️) and the rest of the shirt just dutifully followed. It struck me immediately: we see the exact same thing in company processes. Nothing new, of course, but a nice reminder all the same; get the first step wrong, and no…
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Responsibility vs. Guilt
Silence and passivity are among the most dangerous things I know in management. Not shouting. Not conflict. Just silence. Because where a manager stays quiet, avoids difficult conversations, lets things drift and hopes they’ll resolve themselves, that’s where one of the most destructive cultures a team can have takes root. Slowly, but surely. A culture…
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Bad luck or a pattern?
You hired an external consultant. Six months later, not much has changed, and now you’re looking for someone else. That’s not bad luck. It’s a pattern. Over 25 years in management I’ve sat on both sides of the table, as the one commissioning the work, and as the one winning it. The problem isn’t the…
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From Dead End to Turning Point: The Power of Reframing
“I don’t know what to do with this. I’m completely stuck.” He didn’t even offer me coffee. Which told me more than the words did. The pressure was visible. People waiting for decisions. A founder who felt cornered by circumstances moving faster than his thinking. I didn’t reach for advice. I sat with it for…
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Small Signals, Big Failures
The first warning signs that a project will run into trouble rarely arrive in plain sight. They hide in the details: in a proposal riddled with sloppy errors, in a careless introductory email from a new vendor, or in a contract that still carries last year’s dates. None of these small things will sink a…
