Three decades inside the machine.
It domesticated me, too. Now I help leaders get themselves back.

I started my career by threatening to turn up to a job interview in a Batman costume. I got the interview, and the job. I tell you that because it is the version of me the next thirty years slowly trained out.

I thought the deal was simple. Keep building, keep delivering, and the rest would follow. So I got good at it. I also got careful.

The reckoning, when it came, was a single meeting. A senior colleague tore into my team over things I knew were untrue, and I sat there and said nothing. I had been told beforehand to let him have his way and patch it up with the team later. So I did.

None of it felt like surrender at the time. It felt like being sensible. That is the part that should worry you.

It took me years to see what had happened, and longer to build my way back. The full account is in my essay, How I Became Domesticated.

Wild Leadership exists because I needed it and it did not exist.

Organisations reward the version of you that fits. Over the years the fit gets better and the person gets quieter. Wild Leadership is about getting the rest of you back and putting it to use: saying what you think, deciding what you can stand behind, and choosing what your experience is for. That holds while you are in the senior role, and it holds after it. The advisory work grew from the writing, because people read it and wanted to talk.

I’m Scottish, and I have spent most of my adult life in London. I live in Kent with my wife, Caroline, and keep a boat in Surrey, close to water, weather and the kind of walking that clears the head. I have two grown-up daughters. They are the responsibility I take most seriously. Cooking is how I unwind. I train hard. I write every day.

I believe work should make people more alive. The most important job of a leader is to give people what they need to do the best work they are capable of. That takes trust and freedom, enough challenge, people they feel connected to, and a reason to think the work matters.

Good businesses start there. They make something people value, treat the people who work in them properly, take responsibility for their effect on the world around them, and earn the right to make a profit as a result. Profit matters. It makes things possible. It comes from doing the rest well, and it pays for what comes next.

I care about the human things that business language tends to flatten: belonging and friendship, dignity, nature and beauty, being useful, laughter, and doing work you are proud of. I believe there is a contract between a business and the people who give part of their lives to it, and that contract involves more than a salary.

The same holds beyond work. We get one life, and I don’t want to spend it getting safer, smaller and more edited. I want to use what I have: love people properly, get outside, stay curious, make things, take some risks, have adventures, and do some wild things. And if I can, leave the people I love, the places I’ve touched and the world itself a little better for my having been here.