You were dangerous once.

You are being domesticated.

When you set out on your career you are most your original self. Your dangerous self. Because you haven’t been domesticated by the Machine. But day by day this happens. The put-down in a meeting. Learning when not to speak your mind. The true sentence softened before it leaves your mouth, ten thousand times over. The name for it is Domestication, and what you have been doing is Editing: what you say, how you show up, who you are.

No one forced this. They rewarded it. The fence is reward, not force.

This is not only you. In PwC’s survey of 693 public-company directors, 36 per cent reported difficulty voicing dissent in their own boardroom. Fifty-two per cent said collegiality is one of the things that suppresses it.

Most organisations run like machines. A machine optimises. It edits out whatever it cannot use, and given long enough it edits the leader too. The Machine is not evil. It is doing what it was built to do.

A forest works the other way. It produces rather than extracts. It holds the difference a machine would tidy away.

You spent years running the machine. Something in you remembers you were grown in a forest.

How domestication works, in full.

As you get more senior Domestication gets more serious, because the responsibilities are greater, you have more say, and you will have a team. A team who learn from you what is safe to say, what isn’t, how to act and how not to act. The damage you cause is Taming your team, and you do it without instructing anyone.

I have done this. A fellow director once turned a meeting about a marketing appointment onto my change programme. I knew what he was doing. I said nothing. I told myself I lacked the political capital to speak. That was a decision I had made early and never once revisited. It is Editing, and at the time I would have called it judgement.

Then one day, you make it to the top. The Apex. Nobody has told you it exists, or what staying there costs. You know the position is conditional. You may have nobody to say that to. The evidence is plain. Eventually everyone leaves. Whether they want to or not.

What The Apex is, and what it costs to stay in it.

This is why we need Wild Leadership, a practical philosophy for using your power without losing yourself.

Under a minute a day.

A Hundred Wild Words. An email from me, having lived in The Apex: experiences, insights and ideas. A hundred words or fewer, weekdays around 7am. Something to think about, or something to use before lunch.

One word to daily@wildleadership.co does it. Reply “stop” and I take you off myself. Read a day of it first, if you’d rather.

Ten minutes, alone.

See the specific edit. The thing you softened this week, and who you softened it for.

The Recognition is seven questions on what your team tolerates. You answer them alone, and they take ten minutes.

Your answers come to me. I read every one myself, and within the week I send back a personal read on what they suggest your team is organised around, and an honest view on what, if anything, is worth doing about it. No charge, and I do not add you to anything.