Lawless Thinking brings you insights, tools and encouragement direct from my world of bold C-suite strategy delivery.

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Thought of the Week

“No human is limited”

Eliud Kipchoge

A quiet shift is well underway in the world of work, and only some leaders have begun to build for it.

The machines are getting better at the things we used to get paid for. The analysis. The report. The first draft. A great deal of what once filled a week is now produced in seconds by something that does not rest.

This is not a piece about AI.

This is a piece about what is left when it is no longer viable to pay humans to do the foundational, average-competent tasks in our roles. And the huge opportunity presented to you if you understand the ramifications.

What is left is you.

Your judgement. Your willingness to put a view into a room and stand behind it; to analyse the report and advise your leader – to carry the weight, not to forward a document. Your decision to innovate.

Your willingness to be seen. Your decisive action before all the evidence is available (innovation has left the building when others have provided the certainty).

And all of this requires a new level of courage. And courage, from this point forward, is a commercial and career imperative worthy of your attention.

I want to be precise about what I mean by courage. It is not machismo or bravado. It is not the absence of fear and careful thought. It is the willingness to own a position, to act on it, to be judged for it, to create something that did not exist before this morning.

Courage to own. Courage to act. Courage to try. Courage to be judged. Courage to feel – and to call it based on the feel. Courage to create. Courage to loudly ask for help from those in other fields. Courage to enter into uncertainty and test yourself. Courage to seek data (feedback) to evaluate your performance. Courage to admit to yourself that you were wrong and to go again.

Read that list again. Which of those will a machine will do for you? None of them. Those are the things only you bring. And those are the things the market is about to pay for, because much of what lies beneath them will be free in 18-24 months.

That is why the DARE Loop is here.

DARE is Decision, Action, Result, Evaluate – Loop around again.  It gently guides you to where you can be courageous.

We define and commit to the Result. That takes great courage.

We commit to the clear and conscious Actions required to deliver the clear Result. (See above how Acting to own and deliver a Result can ask us to be brave).

Then we honestly Evaluate how we did, seeking hard truths and data, which sets up the next, better, Decision.

Without courage, you cannot run the loop. You run something else instead.

What you see people run instead is SEAR. Story, Emotion, Action, Result. It feels like thinking but it is autopilot. Watch out for it in meetings.

A Story arrives, formed by yesterday’s reality. It drives an Emotional response. An Action follows, designed mostly to keep you safe according to that Story. A Result lands, often reinforcing the Story as your ‘reality’.

Do you want to know how to spot somebody running on SEAR and not DARE?

1. They can predict the future when presented with uncertainty. They will tell you the bad things that will happen if you try something new. They will act to avoid their (imagined) predicted outcome at all costs.

2. They allocate blame. External forces ‘prevent’ them. But they will never challenge those ‘forces’. ‘The CEO would never allow…’. The prediction, the blame.

But the CEO is never asked and the meeting is closed without progress.

Which is wonderful news. We can all find courage; and it also provides the fuel for our spiritual growth.

A practical invitation for the week ahead:

Find one moment where you are about to run SEAR: “they won’t take me seriously in the meeting”, “X will attack anything like that”, “We aren’t innovative here”, “Our meetings always overrun and I never get heard”.

Don’t predict. Don’t blame. Run DARE instead.

What is the ACTION YOU would have to take to be taken seriously in that meeting?

What ACTION would YOU take to communicate and position with X so that she doesn’t attack? What ACTION must YOU take to begin to generate one (strategically relevant) innovation for your CEO?

What ACTION must YOU take

Is your Tiger roaring now and will it take courage to move?

If it goes wrong, will you have the courage to ask for data, Evaluate and go again?

Courage is the career.

My Fortnight

When I get asked how to present well, my boring answer is: painstaking preparation. This usually has to happen in many early mornings and some late nights.  It’s won or lost before you get onstage. I did even more preparing than usual this week, because I had rashly agreed to deliver a new presentation to a very discerning audience!

Vladimír Fitchner, founder of Fichtner Wealth, the Czech Republic’s premier HNWI advisory practice had offered me the challenge. Our audience were Fichtner’s highly successful clients (50 – 75) AND their children (17-35). It was an extremely successful day.

From Prague to Tenerife, to work with a longstanding friend and client, Adrian Gregory. Adrian is President of EMEA at solutions integrator Insight. His work is fascinating and his approach inspiring. Courage was evident in both the ambitious strategy and the high performing leaders in the room and the presentations I was privileged to hear inspired this week’s newsletter.

The week before was spent with a genuinely extraordinary executive team who deliver an (almost) incomprehensibly complex outcome. Yet they are seeking to Evaluate and DARE again. 

We designed a High Performing Team Contract setting out the precise behaviours they are committing to, to engineer the precise outcome they seek.

Now we begin the hard work together: a one-year journey to deliver a highly ambitious change in results through the exec and across the entire organisation.

Book of the Week

My book of the week this week is a podcast. Many of you have heard me tell the story of Eliud Kipchoge’s secret to becoming the greatest marathon runner in history. Vitamin N (for ‘saying No’ to distractions).

Saying ‘No’ takes enormous courage. Here is the podcast, hosted by Doctor Rangan Chatterjee. Runner or not, we can all learn from the best there has ever been in their field.

Write Your Story 🖋️

Jim

Lawless Thinking brings you insights, tools and encouragement direct from my world of bold C-suite strategy delivery.

If this edition was forwarded to you, you can sign up here to receive your own copy in the future.

Thought of the Week

“Nothing is as easy to sell as a victim narrative”

Jim Lawless

TL;DR

• Our school’s parental WhatsApp group lit up this week: phones, AI and the ‘Anxious Generation’.

• Underneath the concern sat a trending dysfunction: performative blame and public self-righteousness instead of serious adult agency and accountability over a parenting challenge.

• The same dysfunction shows up at work. Our role as leaders, in the boardroom and at the kitchen table, is the same: ‘create’ adults who take their own Decisions and their own Actions to deliver their own Results within clear boundaries.

• Social media personalities such as Jonathan Haidt have become standard bearers for that dysfunction. He is right that something has gone wrong. But he allocates responsibility based on correlation rather than cause and he is wrong about whose job it is to protect our children. The popularity of his outsourced parenting message is worrying.

• The problem is serious, damaging for our children and our economy, so I won’t be bowing to fashion in addressing it.

The Group Chat

Our daughter’s school’s parental WhatsApp group lit up last week. Phones. Social media. AI. Phones = mental health crises (not communication between friends or augmented thinking). The “Anxious Generation” guy says …

People seemed keener to be on message and to blame-on-trend than to share strategies – Decisions and Actions – to bring about the Result of protecting our daughters and preparing them for the real world they will (they already do) inhabit.

Capable, accomplished and often very senior people had arranged themselves in an extremely fashionable, virtuous circle of complaint about the school; the algorithm; the tech bro billionaires; the Government.

This victim narrative is encouraged by authors, social media personalities, mainstream media and the government. It’s big business. It wins advertising eyes and ears, political votes and audience ratings.

What Is A Parent’s Primary Job?

I’ve been reading and reflecting on that question for 29 years of parenting (so far, my youngest is twelve). I certainly do not propose my view is ‘correct’.

But my personal compass bearing is: To love, nurture, role model and teach my children to become adults who can function fully and happily in society: without me.

What’s yours?

(I’d be happy if they lived with me forever. I adore their company. But live with me whilst being able to function fully without me – or I have failed them, in my opinion.)

And who is responsible for parenting our children? School? Tech bros? Regulators? the Prime Minister? Of course not.

Parents are responsible, hopefully with ‘a village’ in support.

I take the increase in anxiety amongst young people extremely seriously. The viciousness of both the ‘femisphere’ and ‘manosphere’ are surely just symptoms of a terrible pain and isolation.

I have a duty to help my daughters navigate the world as it is presented. Not as I wish it to be. That world presents very real dangers therefore my job is to consciously parent her to navigate these.

I can’t support my daughters to live healthy and anxiety-free lives in a world of social media, AI and smartphones by demanding others to change the world to my preference.

That is lobbying; and it is legitimate work. But it is not parenting.

What Is The Job Of A Leader?

In a world of increasing pace, increasing investment in intellectual capital and increasing demands for adaptability and managing uncertainty:

A leader must surely be aiming for happy, fully functioning, independent adults who can operate without them to deliver the strategic outcomes the leaders have clearly set.

Ironically, despite the comparison to parenting, this is about moving away from ‘parent-child’ to ‘adult-adult’ accountability within boundaries.

A Word On Haidt

Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation is a carefully constructed social media phenomenon and also a book. It is an easy flag for broadcasters to gather around: and gather they do in their droves. It removes accountability from us as parents and gives us all pitchforks to wave at the castle. There is nothing as easy to sell as a victim narrative.

Let me be fair to him before I disagree. He has shown that adolescent mental health, particularly for girls, deteriorated sharply across the Western world from around 2010, and he is right to refuse to look away from this terrible suffering.

His central claim, however, is causal. The evidence is correlational, and at population level the numbers are vanishingly small. The same window also covers the financial crisis, the collapse of youth services, youth clubs and libraries, rising academic pressure, reducing job opportunities (that are not yet due to AI) a (statistically largely unjustified) terror of letting children out unaccompanied, and a long decline in unstructured childhood time alone and with peers that began well before the iPhone.

Well used, the smart phone is a vital way for our young people to connect with friends, overcome homework worries or have an expert ‘teacher’ explain a tricky maths problem to them step by step.

But this takes intentional parenting, just as the workplace requires intentional leadership.

We need to ‘get us on their side’. Not ‘get them on our side’ if we want our messages to land.

I have a different candidate for the more causal relationship between screen and childhood mental distress.

The first relationship a child has with a screen is mediated by their relationship with the adult holding one. What an enormous number of children have learned, before they have ever held a phone of their own, is that the device in their parent’s hand is more interesting than they are.

That seems as plausibly causal to me than the smartphone in the hands of the child, but it is a hard sell compared to the case Haidt makes for governments and billionaires to be blamed.

But my deepest objection is structural. Haidt’s framing positions children as objects of policy, acted upon by algorithms and rescued by regulators.

The parent is almost absent. The child is passive throughout. Tech bros and regulators run the show.

The lesson she learns is that the rules of her life are written by powerful adults elsewhere, and her job is to wait for the adults to write better ones.

Which is, arguably, the same lesson that has appealed to the adults on the WhatsApp group demanding that somebody must do something to parent their child.

Subjects, Not Objects

There is a phrase I keep coming back to. It was told to me by the legendary acting teacher Ian Ricketts of Guildford School of Acting when I studied under him in the late 90’s.

“Children are not preparing for life. They are living their lives.”

The twelve-year-old in our house is not in a holding pattern waiting for the adult version of herself to begin. She is, right now, an active human being making decisions about who she is and what she does, in real time, with real consequences and immediate feedback.

Our job is not to delay her use of tecnology until we have removed the influence of the tech bros.

Our job is to give her the tools to live the life she is already living and to fly the nest successfully, in the technological landscape she inhabits.

That is a parenting agenda. It happens to also be a leadership agenda.

…At The Speed Of Trust

Change happens at the speed of trust.

Not the speed of policy, not the speed of legislation, not the speed of the next bestselling author on the “podcast for Instagram algorithm soundbites” circuit. Trust.

A child who trusts you will tell you what she saw online. A child who does not, will not.

A direct report who trusts you will tell you he lost a tool on the deck of an aircraft carrier. One who does not will hide that dangerous error.

Get you on their side. Show up consistently. Manage your emotions.

Trust is a pattern. It is built by being consistent, present, interested, and by handling well the things people tell you. Lose your temper once when she confesses something difficult and you have taught a lesson no legislation can unteach, which is do not bring this home.

My Fortnight

I’ve been to two athletics meets with my youngest daughter this fortnight. Many phones on view. Mainly being used by friends to find friends around the track and by youth athletes (who train their disciplined hearts out) to calculate target split times for their parents to shout from the sidelines at strategic positions!

I’ve also delivered a virtual presentation for a global pharma company, a day of detailed moonshot design for a most fantastic consultancy and a trip to Paris to present to a tech conference amongst preparing for an exciting Executive Team high performing team design workshop next week.

And then there was a marathon! 

Heartfelt thanks to everybody who supported Together for Short Lives and me.  You’re amazing and every single penny makes a difference.

It turns out that when they say “if you can do a half you can do a full” they lied. A ‘race’ of two halves with a half marathon on target and a cramped hobble home from docklands. 

But it was done. I have NEVER received so much support as was screamed out by the spectators across the route and - if you have been meaning to support Together for Short Lives and the families they serve in the most awful of times - now is your chance.

Book of the Fortnight

How to Raise an Adult by Julie Lythcott-Haims.

Lythcott-Haims spent a decade as Dean of Freshmen at Stanford watching capable, accomplished, well-meaning parents quietly disable their own children. The work of parenting is the deliberate, patient transfer of agency to the human in your house, and the substitutes we have invented for that work, however well intentioned, are not working.

Read it with a notebook. The chapter on what she calls checklisted childhood may sting in places, and that is rather the point.

A Book for the Children

You Are Awesome by Matthew Syed.

Syed wrote this for nine to twelve year olds, distilling the growth-mindset thinking from his adult books Bounce and Black Box Thinking into something a child can pick up and use. Capability is built, not given, and the person doing the building is the child themselves.

It’s more on growth mindset than agency and power – but then the foundation of a growth mindset is an empowering: “Perhaps I can!”

Write Your Story 🖋️

Jim

Lawless Thinking brings you insights, tools and encouragement direct from my world of bold C-suite strategy delivery.

If this edition was forwarded to you, you can sign up here to receive your own copy in the future.

Thought of the Week

“How inappropriate to call this planet Earth, when it is clearly Ocean.”

Arthur C. Clarke

TL;DR

• There is a point at which trying harder makes progress slower. A new key must be found. But letting go of the illusion of safety is hard.

• If you are leading speed at scale: what old approach do you need to let go of? What can you no longer monitor and control? What error rate can/must you and the business tolerate and how will you manage that emotionally and structurally?

• The DARE Loop invites constant iteration and reflection on how to change thinking and behaviour to deliver the Result: faster.

• As you read this, I am running the London Marathon for Together for Short Lives — undertrained, the wrong shape, and without a plan for what happens after mile 20.

The Barrier That Effort Built

-50m was the limit of the ‘old way’ and I could not get deeper for weeks. I showed up, ‘tried harder’ and applied everything that had worked for me so far in my life: drive, discipline, will, the accumulated force of not accepting no.

But I stayed at -50 metres. Below me, a white line descended into the black, impossible, slightly terrifying, abyss of my target: -101m. 

The DARE Loop requires constant Evaluation of the Decisions and Actions taken and of the Results they have achieved. Followed by a Loop of iterations: try again.

“Fail better”, as Samuel Beckett wrote. “Solve it from a different consciousness to the one that created it” to misquote Albert.

So, counterintuitively, I stopped pushing harder. Instead, I looped faster and tried new ways through. 

I eventually trusted music. My constant friend in all troubles. An ancient Sanskrit mantra I discovered in a kundalini yoga studio in Camden, sung by Deva Premal: ‘Aad Guray Nameh’, got me past -50 metres and unlocked a new physical and mental state which was the key to -101m.

Leading for Execution at Speed and Scale

High performance isn’t pedalling faster (you are at max RPM, right?). High performance is changing gears: moving to the next level.

On my bike, I can push a button to change gears.

But for an exec team, running a complex business at the max, changing gears means letting go of many of the behaviours that got you there and then trying out a new approach that is, hopefully, appropriate for the task ahead.

It’s a leap of faith and it is extremely emotionally challenging.

You have massive influence as a leader. But you cannot change human nature. Like the ocean, you have to work with it.

Speed means giving others the safety, belief, power and purpose to move faster than feels safe to them.

You cannot do this by getting more into the weeds with them and managing their work. By controlling. By ‘mastering the brief’.

You will need to find a new way through: at the very time that the stakes are rising, at the very moment you want to ‘grab the wheel’ and bark orders.

This involves preparation and care, planning and communication. But then it always requires a leap. And some errors.

Earth or Ocean?

I was optimised for hard work and control. But the ocean does not grade on effort and has no concept of control. I had to operate on her terms.

Shareholders don’t grade on effort either. But more importantly: nor does the living, breathing and often fearful organism that you are leading beyond its historic limits.

The organisation grades on purpose and safety to try, on a solid skills base, on clear decision making architecture, on leadership consistency and support, and on culture. In short: on emotion.

Mile 20: Today’s sticking point

As you read this on Sunday morning, I am running the London Marathon. If you have the app you can track me!

I am running for Together for Short Lives. A charity supporting babies and children with life-limiting and life-threatening conditions and their families.

It’s a charity I have supported since my own family’s experience of a seriously ill child (who made a full recovery). They support people facing and managing the thing I fear the most in life.

And I am running for my friend Danny Bouckley, and for his son Michael who is living his life whilst undergoing treatment for cancer, and for their lovely family.

Michael refuses to be defined by his treatment regime or current illness.

I am not a marathon runner. I am the wrong shape. I started running very late in life. But worse, I’ve really struggled to prioritise the training with my family and client commitments!  I have not run beyond 30 kilometres. I do not know what happens to me after mile 20, because I have never been there. I will have to trust in finding another gear.

But I will find a way to put one foot in front of another for them. Perhaps music will help.

Could you find a moment (and perhaps £20?) to support families who are in terrible pain this morning?

PLEASE SUPPORT MY MARATHON FOR TOGETHER FOR SHORT LIVES HERE

My Fortnight

I have largely been engaged on confidential boardroom advisory work in the defence sector this fortnight which has been extremely successful and very stimulating.

I also had a very successful trip to work in Alicante, Spain and ventured to London to Zoom HQ for a live, and fascinating, ‘fireside chat’ with Benedetto Conversano. Benedetto is the executive advisor to Zoom’s EMEA Customer Council, to whom our chat on ‘Structural Velocity’ was broadcast: via Zoom!

Book of the Fortnight

The book of the week is a mantra for change. I am not religious, so I will not call it a prayer. Of course, you may choose to if you wish.

Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change

The courage to change the things I can

And the wisdom to know the difference.

What do you have to accept that you cannot change? What are the limits of your powers? Can you find the courage to change the things you can?

Write Your Story 🖋️

Jim

Sponsor my London Marathon run for Together for Short Lives

Lawless Thinking brings you insights, tools and encouragement direct from my world of bold C-suite strategy delivery.

If this edition was forwarded to you, you can sign up here to receive your own copy in the future.

Thought of the Week

"When the person who serves the purpose is silenced by the person who is serving the personality: strategy execution loses."

Jim Lawless

TL;DR

When people serve the personality of their leader rather than the purpose of the organisation, strategy execution dies — quietly, politely, and with excellent meeting notes.

The Titanic sank, in part, because a radio operator was serving his wealthiest passengers and his employer, NOT the primary purpose his vessel existed to fulfil.

Our Symmetry.inc Hourglass places the executive team in the middle of the hourglass — not at the top (or bottom) of the pyramid. They are there to create and serve the purpose and strategy that supports them, and those they lead, to deliver Results.

The DARE Loop only works if the Result people are optimising for is the right one. In ‘personality-serving’ cultures, it isn't.

Serve the Purpose. Not the Person

There is a behaviour so common in organisations that it has become almost invisible. It is so prevalent that it has even acquired an acronym.

Aligning with the HiPPO: The Highest Paid Person's Opinion.

In meetings across the world, at every level of seniority, the HiPPO dynamic, if culturally required, plays out the same way. The conversation orients around what will please the senior person. Alternatives are quietly shelved. Challenges are swallowed. Conflict is buried: along with high performance.

In some organisations, second-guessing what the HiPP will think becomes a cottage industry. Pre-meetings to sense-check the political weather before the real meeting begins. Energy that should be directed at the strategy is instead directed at the personality. Agendas are shaped not by what the purpose requires but by what the room calculates the most senior person will find comfortable.

The unit of transformation is the human.

The system here has taught the people that serving the purpose, when it conflicts with the imagined preferences of the authority figure above them, is a career risk.

So they serve the personality instead. They learn the tells. They manage upward. They become extraordinarily skilled at giving the boss what the boss wants — and the strategy gets what is left over.

This is the silent strategy killer that no engagement survey will ever surface. Because everybody is, on paper, fully aligned.

It is traditional to blame the HiPP for this. ‘Patriarchy’ gets whispered. But beware of your blind spots.

In March I was backstage with a well-known and extremely ‘low ego’ global CRO. She was lamenting the fact that when she explored some recent instances of odd decisions in her organisation, she was told that it was because she had said “X” in a conversation.  This conversational comment had moved immediately from an opinion to a frequently repeated: “But Annie says…” *.

Now brace yourself for a story of ‘serving the personality, not the purpose’ that will make your hair stand on end…

*I’ve have changed the leaders’ name.

The Titanic's Radio Room

At 11pm on the night of 14 April 1912, the SS Californian — stationary in an unexpected ice field, ten miles ahead of the Titanic — sent warnings by radio to the still-moving ship: "We are stopped and surrounded by ice."

The Titanic's radio operator, Jack Phillips, cut him off. "Shut up, shut up, I am busy."

And poor old Phillips was busy indeed.

He was busy sending a backlog of personal messages for first-class passengers — messages that wealthy clients had paid to send and that his employer, the Marconi Company, was being paid to deliver.

The purpose his vessel existed to fulfil — to carry 2,224 people safely across the Atlantic — did not feature in the decision he made in that moment.

Even his own primary purpose: to be alive in the morning – was lost in the pressure to be ‘good’.

The Californian ‘shut up’ as instructed. At 2:20am, the Titanic was gone.

When the system trains the people to prioritise the imagined preferences of the authority figure over the purpose of the enterprise — they will do so.

Our Symmetry.inc Hourglass

Our Symmetry.inc strategy execution framework is confidential and cannot be reproduced here. But it places the executive team in a unique slot.

It is an hourglass, not a pyramid. Purpose and Strategy sit at the foundation. The executive team sits near the middle of the hourglass, just below the decision architecture that connects it to the SLT and the people who will deliver globally.

The executive team is not at the top. And it certainly isn’t at the base of an unstable inverted triangle.

It is the energising mechanism by which the purpose, strategy and tactics that it is there to create and serve are turned into thousands of DARE Loops: decision velocity at scale through a solid Second Strategy.

The DARE Loop: So, What is The Result?

The DARE Loop asks a deceptively simple question at the moment of every Decision and Action: what is the Result we are trying to deliver?

It is deceptively simple because in a personality-serving organisation, the honest answer is frequently not the one that appears in the strategy document.

The Result people are optimising for is: deliver what I think the boss wants, and that prevents me being the person who created a problem or a ‘conflict’. (Conflict is a reliable indicator of high trust, purpose and performance)

That is a rational Result. It is probably the Result that the system is built to deliver. It is just not the one that was agreed in the strategy workshop or published on the posters along with the new ‘behaviours.

Here is where that expensive strategy deck, and the ROI in talent, die.

The DARE Loop is ruthless about this. If the Result is unclear, or has been quietly replaced by a more politically comfortable surrogate, then every Decision and Action downstream is built on a false foundation. You do not have a slow organisation. You have a fast organisation — moving with great efficiency toward the wrong destination.

The fix is not a motivational intervention. It is a structural one.

When the Result is clear, and is clearly the consistent compass of the Leaders (the Second Strategy), the question in every meeting will slowly stop being "what is the HiPPO likely to be and how can I ‘align’?" and becomes "what does the Result require of us?" Those are different questions. They produce different Decisions. And they produce different Actions at a very different pace.

My Fortnight

How do you turn an event into a global strategic planning meeting?

Last time I promised you my postcard from San Diego where I was closing Indeed’s Global Leaders Meeting 2026. 800 Global Leaders came together to double down on their mission: Help People Get Jobs.

And there was a clear leadership mandate: Move fast, fail fast, fix fast to deliver that mission during a period of extraordinary uncertainty and change for talent professionals.

But at Indeed that intent is less slogan and more decision velocity architecture.

So we introduced the DARE Loop to the community through my Keynote on the final day. 800 Leaders then headed into 12 facilitated breakouts to build their personal DARE Loop plan to execute the strategy locally, and with their teams, once they left the USA.

One of the things that made this event exceptional for me was the leadership from the top.

Maggie Hulce, Indeed’s CRO, followed me onstage and the way she weaved the DARE Loop into her own message to her organisation with precision and insight was truly fantastic. That's rare. And in my view, that care is what makes a keynote, and an event, deliver lasting change in performance across the world.

Thank you Indeed for committing 100% to your mission and to the DARE Loop, for your trust and hospitality, and your relentless drive to help people get jobs!

After San Diego – time for family and friends and, luckily for us, an Easter break spent in peace.

Book of the Fortnight

Good to Great — Jim Collins

Collins and his research team set out to answer a simple question: what distinguishes companies that make the leap from good to great from those that do not?

One of the most striking findings was the nature of the leaders who presided over those leaps. Collins called them Level 5 leaders — and they confounded every assumption about what great leadership looks like.

Level 5 leaders combine fierce professional will with profound personal humility. They are utterly determined to make the organisation succeed — and utterly uninterested in personal credit for that success. When things go well, they look out of the window and credit their people. When things go wrong, they look in the mirror and hold themselves accountable.

The contrast Collins draws is precise. The celebrity CEO — the high-profile personality around whom the organisation revolves — frequently produces strong short-term results and lasting long-term damage.

The Level 5 leader builds something that outlasts and outperforms them, because the organisation was never organised around their personality in the first place.

It was organised around the purpose.

Write Your Story 🖋️

Jim

Lawless Thinking brings you insights, tools and encouragement direct from my world of bold C-suite strategy delivery.

If this edition was forwarded to you, you can sign up here to receive your own copy in the future.

Thought of the Week

“The decision that saves you at depth was taken long before you entered the water”

Jim Lawless

TL;DR

• At -100m with no air, if trouble comes, the factor determining your success is your ability to maintain total stillness and execute the plan.

• The challenge facing a freediver at depth is the same challenge facing an executive team guiding the organisation through genuine uncertainty to deliver the strategy.

• The deepest divers are not the bravest. They are the most still and prepared. That insight changes everything about how we lead under pressure.

• The question for you and your Executive Team: when your people hit the dark water and ‘wobble’: what have you actually trained them for? Stillness and execution? Or Escalation, Meetings and Hesitation?

The Last Moment of Doubt

I am descending. The surface is a shrinking pale disc of light above me. My music takes over my consciousness.

At around 40 metres, something shifts. Not in the water. In the mathematics of the situation. I am quietly passing the ‘last moment of doubt’.

Beyond this point, if something goes wrong, instinct and ‘trying hard’ will not save me. The surface is now too far away. What happens now is entirely a function of what I did before I entered the water.

My great coach and friend Andrea Zuccari understood this better than anyone I have ever met. Andrea and Marco Nones changed freediving together. They coached and supported me to 101 metres. Marco coaches me still at his centre in Sharm El Sheikh. Andrea died in the beautiful Red Sea that he loved. The ocean is not cruel. She is utterly, absolutely, indifferent.

Leaving my emotions aside (and there are plenty): Andrea made a very uncharacteristic error in his process and preparation before he entered the water. There wasn’t a way back from the error.

Some say that organisations don’t have ‘Last Useful Moments’ before they ‘commit to the dive’. There is always time to recover. They are playing an ‘Infinite Game’.

I believe my clients’ work (and particularly in the defence sector at present), is far more important than that. There are critical decisions. Hurdles that must be cleared by the leaders. Jobs to be done. Consequences.

The question is not whether you will reach a last useful moment. You will. Every leader does. You must commit and go.

The question is what you do between now and then. What decisions you take, what authority you devolve, what trust you build, what honest evaluation you run — before the depth tests your preparation and process.

Your prep isn’t a strategy deck. It’s the organisation you optimise to deliver it.

What the Dark Teaches

At 101 metres, the human body does things that feel profoundly wrong. But they are not wrong. That tension must be held as we deliver the objective.

The lungs compress to the size of a fist. The diaphragm rises into the chest. The heart rate drops, in elite divers, to fewer than thirty beats per minute. The mammalian dive reflex begins pausing non-essential systems. Blood migrates from the extremities to protect the heart and brain.

You do what dolphins do. I dare you to not be amazed at how incredible you are – and how close a sibling to one of the world’s most beautiful inhabitants!

As your body shifts, you must remain mentally still and in total physical relaxation. Otherwise, the barotrauma injury will be life changing.

You cannot think your way into surrendering to the ocean in this way. You definitely cannot ‘respond’ your way through it or use strength. You have to have prepared to go through it — long before the moment arrives.

As a helicopter pilot, I would use exactly the same language about an autorotation when the engine fails. I have done many hundreds of autorotations in practice. Now my mentor can turn off our power mid-flight without warning and I’ll land the aircraft safely.

When genuine uncertainty hits an organisation — not managed risk, but real uncertainty — the executive team that has not built its Second Strategy: the pre-taken decisions about how it will and will not behave in order to deliver the Enterprise Strategy through its people will do exactly what the unprepared diver does.

It will panic and operate heroically.

Panic, at depth, is lethal because it consumes oxygen at a catastrophic rate. You burn through your reserve in seconds. The thing that was going to get you home is gone.

In organisations, that oxygen is trust. The unprepared leadership team burns through it in the first quarter of the crisis — through contradictory signals, accepting escalated decisions without boundaries in place – decisions they said were delegated long ago, and leaders quietly retreat to what they know.

The Diver’s Paradox

Elite freediving is not an ‘adrenaline sport’. The deepest dives are the calmest.

The divers who go deepest are not the bravest. They are not the most reckless or the most driven. They are the most still. The most prepared.

At depth, stillness is not a personality trait. It is a conscious trained skill. It is a performance variable. A competitive advantage.

Every unnecessary movement, every spike of anxiety, every unresolved question burns oxygen. The diver who goes deep has learned — through relentless preparation and brutally honest evaluation — how to be still when everything around them is saying: move, fight, get out.

This is the insight that can be missing in leadership under pressure.

The leaders I see burning out, freezing up, or reverting to micromanagement under transformation pressure are not weak. They are moving too much. Calling too many meetings. Reversing too many decisions. Checking in where they should be trusting. Permitting escalation without boundaries.

Each intervention feels responsible. Each one costs oxygen. Each re-inforces parent-child escalation and destroys accountability.

The executive team that goes deep and comes back up transformed is the one that has done the preparation work — not the strategy deck, but the living Second Strategy. The hard conversations about authority and accountability before the emotions of uncertainty across the organisation demanded them. The decision-rights architecture agreed before uncertainty made it feel too risky to delegate. The trust built before it was needed as a survival resource.

They prepare to go deep. They go there still and calm. They come home transformed.

The ocean does not grade on effort. It punishes a ‘reversion to heroics’ hard.

Ditto the market when speed of execution is required.

Book of the Fortnight

Relentless — Tim Grover

Grover trained Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant for a combined three decades. He watched the best performers in the world at the moment of maximum pressure — and his overall conclusion is straightforward:

They weren’t choosing. They had already decided.

Not in the fourth quarter or in the Finals: but in the gym. When nobody was watching and nothing was at stake except the quality of the preparation.

Grover’s framework - Coolers, Closers and Cleaners - is a diagnostic.

Most organisations are built for Coolers: solid, reliable, performing well when conditions support them. Closers sit in the middle. They can rise to the moment. They deliver under pressure when it matters. But they still feel the weight of the decision. They still negotiate internally. They can switch it on — but it costs them. 

The rarest category, the Cleaners, have removed the internal negotiation entirely. The question of whether to act, how to act, and whether the cost is worth it was answered long before the moment of pressure arrived.

A Strategy is a series of pre-taken decisions to hit the goal. This is the DARE Loop at its most unforgiving. A new Result requires new Decisions and Actions — can we make those Decisions, Actions, and the rationale behind them so deeply practised that under pressure they require no thought at all.

My Fortnight

Triton Partners is a unique and dynamic private equity firm. I was happy to be invited to a meeting of their portfolio CEOs and Chairs in their founding City of Stockholm to speak on ‘The Need For Speed – and How to Deliver It’. A fantastic event and very stimulating dinner conversation in a room of fast-moving European CEOs from a wide range of sectors and backgrounds.

LinkedIn invited me to close the London edition of their ‘Talent Connect” Series. A wonderful team and a world-class production, I was invited to speak on “The Courage to turn Vision into Reality”.

I am writing to you on the plane to speak in San Diego and will send you a postcard in my next newsletter.

In the confidential part of my work, my biggest reflection this fortnight has been on boundaries:

Allowing ourselves to breach our own boundaries in order to “help” by grabbing the wheel and allowing others to breach our boundaries by permitting escalation.

It is intimidating for leaders to put these boundaries in place. We’ve been navigating that intimidating work to accelerate execution through others.

Write Your Story 🖋️

Jim

Lawless Thinking brings you insights, tools and encouragement direct from my world of bold C-suite strategy delivery.

If this edition was forwarded to you, you can sign up here to receive your own copy in the future.

Thought of the Week

“Given an exciting ambition, the human instinct is to Hesitate, Escalate or Congregate, not to walk bravely and decisively into the uncertainty and action required to succeed.”

Today I re-introduce the DARE Loop™️. Over the past weeks I have written about leading change, particularly, through the Second Strategy. Today is about delivering a change in our own behaviour, alone, or as a leader who influences thousands to deliver ambitious Results.

This is an unashamed pitch, but it is not a commercial pitch: the product is provided free of charge for you below.

This is a pitch for a concept which has already positively impacted the trajectories of many lives, relationships, careers and large businesses. I use it at C-Suite, in global transformations, with my own children and in my own endeavours.

The DARE Loop™️

Decision – Action – Result – Evaluate – Loop.

The DARE Loop™️ is a simple, powerful mental model.

A memorable, disciplined and structured way of thinking that builds accountability, speed, clarity and encourages first principles thinking to create the Decisions and agree the Actions necessary to deliver clear and defined Results.

It then embeds learning, data seeking, feedback and rapid iteration.

It is so simple, that we now have many children using it to achieve the things that are important to them:

First, I MUST define and be clear on my Result: what do I want to create / what is the problem I am trying to solve?

Next, I must define the new Decisions and Actions required of me to get to that Result.

Finally, I Evaluate my/our performance, I learn, I improve, iterate and take new Decisions and Actions: the Loop.

First Principles Thinking

Thinking from First Principles means that I don’t have to operate from a default and inaccurate map. A story about myself, the company, the boss, the past/future and what ‘people like me’ can do.

I can work instead from what is required to deliver the Result and whether I am willing to walk that path.  

The DARE Loop™️ has first principles thinking and the scientific method built in.  

What are the Decisions and Actions required to deliver the Result? Did our idea work and how can we improve the experiment?

When linked with other awareness tools, such as The Why Not Wheel (which clients of mine will recognise) this is fantastically liberating for teams.

Accountability and Ownership

The mental model requires that I take ownership of the Result and of my Decisions and Actions, not that ‘I get to blame XYZ’.

Of course, I may need to pause for more information, require authority to act or benefit hugely from collaboration (Hesitate/Escalate/Congregate): but the DARE Loop™️ makes this a conscious, owned, professional Decision to deliver a professional Result; not a cultural habit or way of self-soothing the discomfort of uncertainty.

Speed of Action, Failure and Iteration

We don’t want people to ‘move fast and break things’. We want people to move fast towards a clear result, break things if necessary to deliver that Result, test their work and then iterate quickly to make it better.

With disciplined and professional use of the DARE Loop™️ speed, learning, precision of agreeing desired Results and rapid iteration to improve is built into the thinking and the vocabulary.

A Vocabulary for Alignment, Precision, Feedback, Meetings and Challenge

Is a meeting taking Decisions and agreeing Actions to deliver a clear and agreed Result? The most junior person in the room can now assess this and, if the vocabulary is shared, can challenge the seniors using an agreed DARE structure.

“I may have missed it, but I am unclear on the Result we are seeking here – could somebody explain to me the problem we are trying to solve?”

No Actions agreed after a discussion? Then of course even a very junior colleague can challenge that also.

Agency and Mental Health

We know that one of the greatest things we can do for the mental well-being of our people is give autonomy.

We also know that in a fast moving knowledge enterprise we want smart people taking decisions - not escalating for approvals.

At its heart, the DARE Loop™️ gives people AGENCY. When I introduce it in a conference room or the team deliver it into a Transformation – we see the energy rise as the power to create the future increases.

My dive to 101m in 2010 raised funds for paediatric medicine research after my little daughter’s recovery from serious illness.

Flowing on from that difficult time, I have supported Together for Short Lives for many years and this year they have allowed me to run the London Marathon for them!

TfSL support babies, children and young people living with life limiting conditions, their families and the professionals that care for them.  And you can support them too if you could spare a moment to sponsor my marathon run here.

Challenge of the Week

I’m shaking it up this week – not a book, but a challenge.

What Result do you want?

What Decision is obvious – but you are avoiding?

What Action do you already know is needed?

What would it look like to Evaluate honestly your approach to date and learn from that to iterate and do better?

Remember – agency. Try not to ‘blame’ your parents, spouse or boss for the Result. No blame need be allocated anywhere.

We are adults living on a beautiful planet. Do we DARE to live that life to the full?

My Fortnight

In my advisory work I am deep in organisational acceleration and strategy execution in the defence sector. As a father, and having sat nights out in air raid shelters in Kyiv and Lviv, this has become vocational for me and is driving some long hours and some very exciting breakthroughs in thinking.

In my speaking work, well I am a very expensive option for an energy boost after lunch.

So, mercifully, whilst I am often given the graveyard slot, my clients want me to solve a specific problem and build a legacy from the event with clear, bold, individual strategic actions that didn’t exist before the session. This I love.

Clients this past fortnight from a sunny if windy Miami (a global gathering) to the fabulous new Battersea Power Station in London (A UK gathering) have been building on record-breaking, high-performance successes.

Each subtly different (Miami, a legendary global comms company – London an extraordinary UK retailer delivering outstanding success) but each wanting, in different ways, the teams to Evaluate their huge successes. Learn. Iterate. And LOOP into the 2026 strategy.

They also both wanted the individuals to commit to specific Results, Decisions and Actions in line with the Strategy before leaving the event. So we designed two very different workshops together to follow my presentation with outstanding results. Thank you to every member of both audiences for your courage and innovation.

Write Your Story 🖋️

Jim

Lawless Thinking brings you insights, tools and encouragement direct from my world of bold C-suite strategy delivery.

If this edition was forwarded to you, you can sign up here to receive your own copy in the future.

Thought of the Week

“Do you have the courage to prepare carefully for the future?

Or do you just repeat what you saw work in the past?”

TL; DR

• The FT reports many drones sent to Ukraine are obsolete on arrival and stripped for parts.

•  In fast-moving environments, repeating yesterday remains our mental bias and emotional preference – but is quite useless.

• We must design for speed, for human agility: learning and adapting faster than the opposition.

• What does it mean for you? Are you taking bold Decisions and Actions based on a clear future Result? Or Deciding from habits formed and grooved a decade ago?

Preparing for the Past…

Legend has it that Canadian Spitfire ace George Beurling used to sit under shady trees between sorties pointing at birds flying in the sky whilst others drank tea.

He was rehearsing velocity prediction. His finger was, in fact, just ahead of the bird. He was firing an imaginary round to meet the bird a second later, obsessively refining his accuracy in combat.

One of the greatest aerial marksmen in history, Buerling knew well that aiming at a fast-moving target meant the bullet would pass behind it.

When mobilizing an organisation, or a national defence, this approach demands a deal of courage.

A recurring theme in Prof. Sir Lawrence Freedman’s book ‘Strategy: A History’ is that we prepare to fight the previous war again – not to fight the coming war. In other words, even our Generals suffer from continuation bias. The assumption that it will all go on as it did.

… Or Building for the Future?

What is the future target that you must consciously build your organisation to accurately hit? And how?

This question, which has underpinned my professional life for two decades, was given even greater poignancy for me this week when I read the following in the FT, released online on 26 February:

 “Many drones given to Kyiv’s forces by its western allies are obsolete by the time they arrive. Ukrainian drone unit commanders and engineers told the FT that most western drones needed to be reconfigured before use and that many end up being cannibalised and scrapped for parts.”

Software, radio control frequencies and autonomous navigation advances render them useless in days and weeks, not months and years, the article goes on.

(To delve further into how ill-prepared NATO is to fight a future, rather than historic, war see how 10 Ukrainian drone operators direct from the front line inflicted enormous mock ‘damage’ on NATO troops during a training exercise).

How Radically Different Must Decisions and Actions be?

Remember our DARE Loop:  Decision, Action, Result, Evaluate: then Loop around again.

If the Result is defined as:

“The future of warfare is drones, therefore, as we did in the past with artillery shells, we must stockpile drones” then: ‘Build warehouses full of drones” is the rational Decision we should Act upon.

But if the Result is defined as:

“The ability to hit our targets whilst hacking and out-innovating the enemy’s electronic warfare and targeting systems week after week, across different terrain and seasons for four or more years” then the Decisions and Actions look entirely different.

Now we must build capability, not stockpiles. We need skills in rapid innovation and iteration, in coding and in overnight manufacturing process re-design.

Now we must teach Generals how to listen to warnings from 19-year-old coders and not to scare them into silence.

Now we must learn how to build and hide mini factories on the front line with instantaneous comms to PhD technologists in our universities.

And when I talk to veterans at Unbroken in Lviv, they will tell me with pride about 12-month-old drone technology. But when I ask them how on earth a state-of-the-art Russian warship was destroyed by USVs more recently, I receive steely silence and a subtle smile:

So we also need to build security and counterintelligence to the highest level.

What is the organisation you are building?

A question for you, not me.

But I will suggest that it will likely require the adaptability and agility that we see in the tech war that young, brilliant minds are fighting in Ukraine.

And that it will require clear a strategy to meet your next challenge, and a refined Second Strategy to build the organisational capability to execute and iterate it fast.

My dive to 101m in 2010 raised funds for paediatric medicine research after my little daughter’s recovery from serious illness.

Flowing on from that difficult time, I have supported Together for Short Lives for many years and this year they have allowed me to run the London Marathon for them!

TfSL support babies, children and young people living with life limiting conditions, their families and the professionals that care for them.  And you can support them too if you could spare a moment to sponsor my marathon run here.

My Fortnight

The theme of the past fortnight has been the courage to define the Result and to adapt Decisions and Actions to get there.

From the defence sector to heavy architectural engineering to the application of AI to transform the provision of strategic insights within the market research industry, the challenge I and my audiences and client Exec teams have been set has remained constant: how do we accelerate decision velocity and reduce organisational latency.

Thank you to my long-term advisory and to my keynote clients for a most stimulating fortnight.

I have also been thoroughly enjoying an early draft of “The Braveheart CIO” by Benedetto Conversano.

Benedetto was my client at IKEA and more recently as CIO of Diageo where we designed and delivered significant transformation together. You cannot buy it just yet - but do connect with Benedetto if you think technology is a part of your strategy and want to keep up with his thinking.

Book Of The Fortnight 

On Strategists and Strategy — Lawrence Freedman

I am taking a risk. I will only start reading the recommended book when I receive my copy on Tuesday.  It is released tomorrow, Monday 2 March.

Lawrence Freedman’s new book has, however, been widely trailed and you can hear interviews with him about it on the BBC Sounds app. It is a collection of his most important essays from the past decade on war, crisis and geopolitics.

The anticipated central warning seems very consistent with our theme of the week, and the FT article that prompted my focus: institutions often cling to what once worked and mistake familiarity for preparedness.

I suspect Freedman will remind us that strategy is not a fixed plan or a confident prediction. It is a discipline that stays effective as circumstances shift — politically, technologically and tactically. Grand visions collapse without adaptation and when assumptions harden into habits.

Write YOUR story 🖋️

Jim

Lawless Thinking brings you insights, tools and encouragement direct from my world of bold C-suite strategy delivery.

If this edition was forwarded to you, you can sign up here to receive your own copy in the future.

Thought of the Week

“Nobody fears failure.

We fear the consequences of failure.”

Nobody fears failure

Allow me to illustrate:

I may miss my plane: I have children at home, no money for another flight and a difficult boss who could fire me if I am not present at 9am tomorrow. Do I fear the failure to make my flight?

I may miss my plane: I am single, can buy another ticket without thinking about cost and can work from anywhere in the meantime. Do I fear the failure to make my flight?

Nobody fears failure. We fear the consequence of failure.

Let’s leave that idea here for a moment and think about strategy.

The Enterprise Strategy

An Enterprise Strategy is a set of Decisions dictating how you will (and will not) Act in the future to concentrate all your powers to achieve a defined Result.

This can be expensive, but relatively easy, to create. Turning the slide deck into disciplined Decisions and bold Actions at a global scale is complex.

Why? Primarily because you are asking people you have never met to do new things, and stop doing old things (therefore uncertain and fear-inducing), when you are not close to them in space or time.

Change happens at the speed of trust – not at the speed of the cascaded ‘behaviours deck’.  And the if the ‘behaviours deck’ bears no resemblance to the stories I hear from survivors of Exec Team encounters, it’s just more material for the W*nkernomics boys.

We take risks according to the stories about the consequences of failure – not the behaviours deck.

So you need what I refer to as a ‘Second Strategy’.

The Second Strategy

Your Second Strategy is:

“A set of Decisions dictating how the Exec Team and Top 100 will (and will not) Act in the future to achieve a defined Result through their organisation.”

This is not ‘leadership training’. It is a change in a relationship dynamic. It is similar to the tools needed to set a unique and delicate marriage on a long-term success path.

And, like a marriage, if these Decisions are not defined, owned and believed in by those who must Act on them every day, and who truly desire the Result: They are ignored.

For clarity, this work will usually include defining (and contracting to) actions that will generate trust: Consistency, Congruence, Clarity, Simplicity, Confidence-building, Speed, Inspiration and Empowerment (meaning specifically delegated Decision rights) – in every encounter with any member of the executive team.

Building Performance and Speed: A New Relationship, not ‘the behaviours piece’

Outside of my advisory work, I will have around 50 pre-keynote briefing calls this year asking me to help with:

• · Lack of accountability

• · They freeze in uncertainty

• · They escalate any hard decision

• · We have a meetings culture

• · It’s not happening at all / Not happening fast enough

• · Nobody is willing to ‘leave the comfort zone’

• · They must stop fearing failure

• · They must take risks

These can be blind spots on the part of the people in the room, of course.

These may also be symptoms of a belief that the price of any incorrect Decision or Action is too high for me: “I cannot pay the price of moving fast and making an error around here, I’d better call a meeting”.

Nobody fears failure. We only fear the consequence of failure.

The consequence of failure is, generally, set by the stories people tell about their experiences with the CEO and the Exec Team.

Which is why the Second Strategy is critical.

My dive to 101m in 2010 raised funds for paediatric medicine research after my little daughter’s recovery from serious illness.

Flowing on from that difficult time, I have supported Together for Short Lives for many years and this year they have allowed me to run the London Marathon for them!

TfSL support babies, children and young people living with life limiting conditions, their families and the professionals that care for them.  And you can support them too if you could spare a moment to sponsor my marathon run here.

My Fortnight

Firstly, my thanks to people defrosting aeroplanes and making runways safe from Vilnius to Brussels to Warsaw and to the Polish and Ukrainian railway teams who delivered me safely to Lviv. It has been a rich fortnight of meetings and events.

I will relay only one experience. One that will hit home especially to those on school WhatsApp groups around the world.

It becomes all too easy to think that parents raising children in tents in Gaza, or under Russian bombs in Ukraine, are somehow ‘able to cope’. That one ‘grows accustomed’ to it and is ‘resilient’.

I arranged a coffee with a friend in Lviv for the hour before she was to collect her 5-year-old child from school.

Russia began bombing Lviv as I was walking to the coffee shop. We switched venue to a tunnel full of scared, hiding citizens. We listened to ballistic missiles strike civilian and energy infrastructure as we spoke about our children and our lives.

But she was distracted and kept her eye on her phone.

Because that is where there the photos of the children in the school shelter were being shared to calm the parents. Five-year-olds. Trying to sing and dance the noise of Russian ballistic missiles away.

When we arrived at the school, my friend got the update from the teacher that all parents of tinies remember. Except, not quite as we remember. It was not about what she ate or whether was happy at school today.

The report was about how well she managed her stress levels, underground, while Russia bombed civilian targets around her.

Lest we forget.

Book Of The Fortnight 

If you’d like to read a ‘Second Strategy’ case study, I recommend ‘Turn the Ship Around’ by David Marquet.

Marquet tells the story of taking command of a nuclear submarine and realising that the crew had been trained by the previous ‘exec team’ not to think but to wait, to defer, to comply and to seek permissions.  In such a high risk environment that felt nice and safe safe. Until it wasn’t safe.

Marquet shifts the locus of control. Authority stayed with the boss. Ownership moved to the crew. Performance soared.

The relationship was changed. Trust was built. An ‘intent’ (to quote Marquet) to change the relationship and the power dynamics.

Write YOUR story 🖋️

Jim

Lawless Thinking brings you insights, tools and encouragement direct from my world of bold C-suite strategy delivery.

If this edition was forwarded to you, you can sign up here to receive your own copy in the future.

My dive to 101m in 2010 raised funds for paediatric medicine research after my little daughter’s recovery from serious illness.

Flowing on from that difficult time, I have supported Together for Short Lives for many years and this year they have allowed me to run the London Marathon for them!

TfSL support babies, children and young people living with life limiting conditions, their families and the professionals that care for them.  And you can support them too if you could spare a moment to sponsor my marathon run here.

Thought of the Week

“When authority to own the Decision and Action is unclear, capable people stop thinking and start complying.”

“Permission to speak, Sir?”: Milgram, Stanford Prison and Your Strategy.

In 2016 I was engaged by London’s Met Police. Whilst there, an officer asked me for ideas to fix the problem of people not reporting suspicious activity on the Tube. It was a fascinating chat, but we didn’t solve the problem.

Later that year, however, that officer and their team made an astonishing breakthrough, creating a global case study in giving people permission to change (or, to be precise, in using behavioural economics to address a wicked problem in a dynamic, complex system).

You can apply the same thinking in the delivery of your strategy – to give people permission to help you win.

Conformity and Compliance with the System.

To execute your strategy, you need people wanting to take new Decisions and Actions to deliver new Results, far away from you in space and time.

That’s the central task of the CEO and executive team in leading transformation.

But decades of research, including Milgram, the Stanford Prison Experiment, Nuremberg Trial research, etc, show that when authority to own the Decision and Action is unclear, capable people stop thinking and start complying. They comply with either the norms of the herd or with the perceived desires of authority.

Humans need permission to Decide and Act differently in a community.

Around 4 million people use the London Tube each day: many more witnesses than criminals. However, everybody strives to blend in on the Tube. Apart from standing to the right on an escalator, it’s the main rule of the system.

Criminals rely on that system working: eyes down, nobody speaks, nobody is willing to stand out, nobody intervenes, nobody thinks it’s their place to act or that it’s their personal problem to solve.

Conformity and a lack of permission to break from the herd were the problems the Met Police faced. And their solution was a stroke of genius:

“See it. Say it. Sorted.”

In one line, the police gave every passenger:

Permission: It gives permission to stand out and act (and makes the action easy).

Purpose: You could ‘sort’ a potential disaster

New Norms of Conformity: It hints that ‘most people’ do the right thing and that changes what conformity looks like.

The Met have spread that now ubiquitous message consistently for a decade creating a mantra every Londoner can recite.

Since the launch of See it. Say it. Sorted., more than one million reports have been sent by passengers to British Transport Police, with annual reporting increasing over eight-fold — turning London commuters from zombies (yes, I was one too) into an active safety network.

(If you don’t want to conform to the inaccurate narrative about how unsafe my great home city of London is, try the facts instead as set out in last week’s Economist)

How Accidents Happen - Permission in Gas and Nuclear Plants.

In 2023 I shared a stage at a safety conference with Mark Byard, Director of Safety and Howard Forster, COO of Cadent Gas, the UK’s biggest distributor of natural gas and one of the largest energy infrastructure operators in the UK.

Howard explained that ALL of the accidents he had seen in his long, distinguished career (apart from a few he could count on the fingers of one hand) could have been prevented IF a person who saw the problem in advance felt they had the permission to speak up.

In other words, almost all accidents were preventable but systems generated conformity and people felt they did not have permission to intervene.

He contrasted that with seeing an overalled shift worker at a nuclear power plant shouting up to a suited VIP Politician visitor being escorted by the CEO that he should be holding the handrail of the high gantry he was walking along.

On that site, Permission, Purpose and new Norms of Conformity had been established.

And Your Strategy?

The question as we turn to your strategy is, yes, how do you create the permission? But fast on its heels: how do you role model it?

Most people’s experience is that shouting instructions to the VIP client visitor is not welcomed by the CEO escorting them. Contracting the Exec and Top 100 to the new way so they can react well in the moment is critical. Without it, a poster proclaiming permission to act is, justifiably, ammunition for your cynics.

My Fortnight

It’s SKO time so I have been travelling and speaking which has been an absolute delight. Thank you to all who have invited me to your wonderful events.

The most thought provoking presentation I have seen during this time was not in an exotic SKO location, but in Nottingham, UK.

Herman Visagie, an English teacher and housemaster from Michaelhouse School in South Africa delivered the most extraordinarily insightful presentation about compliance and speaking out in the school pupil community, citing Milgram and the Stanford Prison Experiment and his own careful research.

Herman’s thoughtful presentation prompted me to address how we give permission to challenge conformity in the system this week.

Book Of The Fortnight 

In Nudge, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein show that people in a system rarely change behaviour because they’ve been persuaded. They change because the environment makes a different action easier, safer, and more socially acceptable.

By carefully designing a “choice architecture” — the cues, defaults, and signals around a decision, leaders can shift behaviour without mandates or motivation – where ‘command and control’ is simply not an option.

The insight is simple but profound: when action is clear, low-risk, and normalised, people act.

This is why interventions like See it. Say it. Sorted. work, giving explicit permission and a frictionless path to do what people sense is the right thing.

Write YOUR story 🖋️

Jim

Lawless Thinking brings you insights, tools and encouragement direct from my world of bold C-suite strategy delivery.

If this edition was forwarded to you, you can sign up here to receive your own copy in the future.

TLDR:  Two tensions can break strategy execution across the organisation if not held by the CEO. But holding these tensions well is probably not how you got the CEO role.

A plan is not a strategy; a set of choices is. So strategy execution is a DARE Loop: Decisions and Actions to deliver defined Results (then Evaluate and Loop). Two CEO decisions can destroy strategy execution if the tension cannot be managed by the CEO:

1. When a non-strategic opportunity arrives that will delight shareholders and land your bonus (and tell all your people and customers that your strategic decisions are up for sale) can you identify and hold the tension?

2. When you are, possibly, the best decision-maker in the organisation, but you want a team that is accountable, takes decisions fast and escalates rarely – can you hold the tension at the precise moment when you want to ‘help’ somebody do it better?

The Price of Strategy Execution

Strategy definition is cheap and relatively easy. A document is prepared. Priorities are agreed. Now it is time to execute this for the next 2-5 years.

That execution demands a high personal price of the CEO.

The price is emotional and psychological: Enduring the holding of tensions. The payer never knows when the price will be demanded during a day, so they cannot prepare.

This price must be paid until the strategic transformation is complete. It’s a full Ironman distance of commitment, not a 5k Sunday parkrun.

The price is paid in two tensions that are particularly hard for a senior leader to pay: The payment is in surrender of CONTROL and OPPORTUNITY. The very attributes that got them to the top

Strategies Fail but Execution Fails More

Strategies can of course fail because they are poor. Jaguar’s ‘pink’ rebrand, New Coke’s launch and Operation Barbarossa being just three examples from the past 100 years. 

Strategies can fail because they are not strategies. This is common. A vision, some values and some ‘strategic priorities’ being a recognisable example.

But in my experience of working with executive teams when the strategy is not ‘firing’, and in getting deeper into an organisation to gather data about what is really going on: the CEO is often not fully aware of the price only they can pay. 

So, naturally, they are not paying it. When the tension is high – they fold.

They forget the strategic Results when the tension grows. They are seduced by short term Results. They then take very public Decisions and Actions that run counter to the strategy. Then they use the wrong Evaluation criteria (short term, not strategic) to assess their Results – and deem them a win.

Now we spiral. Let me show you how:

Price One: Holding Opportunity Tension

Strategy reduces the permitted decisions. This brings structure, clarity, direction and a narrative.

We carefully sell all that to the organisation, to suppliers and customers, and we invest accordingly. This is a truly enormous amount of work.

Inevitably a shiny new thing: a territory, product, operating model, some appealing cure for fear of lack of rapid progress or debilitating self-doubt or cashflow troubles, becomes compelling.

If the CEO cannot hold the tension when the desire to take non-strategic choices is high, then the work is undone. Everybody sees. Everybody breathes out, releases the tension and moves to short term wins.

Everybody knows the strategy was just ‘the flavour of the month’.

Of course, holding that tension, saying no to opportunity, does not feel ‘strategic’.

It feels like RISK. It feels like LOSS. It is ‘scary’. It runs counter to every survival instinct for the human being paid to manage the risk and ensure the survival. The ‘Tiger’ roars loudly.

The tension is immense. The challenge is real. Success requires immense courage to hold the line.

My dive to 101m in 2010 raised funds for paediatric medicine research after my little daughter’s recovery from serious illness.

Flowing on from that difficult time, I have supported Together for Short Lives for many years and this year they have allowed me to run the London Marathon for them!

TfSL support babies, children and young people living with life limiting conditions, their families and the professionals that care for them.  And you can support them too if you could spare a moment to sponsor my marathon run here.

Price Two: Holding Control Tension

To execute the strategy fast, you will need the correct Decision and Action being owned by the correct person – and taken as quickly as possible. Habitual escalation and meetings to bring reassurance and share the exposure of decision making with others are blockers, except where truly necessary.

And yet we are changing. There is uncertainty. There is doubt. People feel risk – they are outside of their comfort zones.

There is a real tension here. Did she really give me the power? Do I really have permission to do THIS? This is a fragile moment and extremely consequential.

It requires a cohesive executive team that exercises a discipline in devolving safe decisions and holding the tension of that devolution.

Yet many, by no means all, but many exec teams are dominated by the boss. Second-guessing the boss slows the exec’s decisions and causes tensions and resentments.

But by the time we explore the data two levels down, beneath the top 100, second guessing what the boss wants us to do is a cottage industry. Everybody wants a meeting or an escalation to be given reassurance – the CEO has set the tone and the shadow is cast.

The tension the CEO needs to hold here is to resist taking on the weight of other people’s decisions – except where vital. Resisting speaking when they can see a marginally better way – but the cost of providing that in re-taking control is greater than the benefit it will bring in ‘the better way’.

Hardest of all, this tension requires resisting deploying the very attribute that got them the job. Being a superb decision maker and technical operator who is unafraid to take big decisions.

But the big decision now is:

Will I withstand every emotion in my body telling me to seize the opportunity or to take the decision that I truly want other people to take - except when it is manifestly unsafe to do so? Or will I take the wheel – causing echoes around the organisation?

My Fortnight

The weather may have been cold, but the pace of transformation has been keeping my clients and me very warm indeed.

A recurring theme is that: it’s bold - but we cannot fail. This reality brings a focus from members of my client exec teams that is a joy to work with.

Whilst the projects are confidential, the work includes partnering with leaders accountable for accelerating the production of defence capabilities (which, having sheltered from air raids in Kyiv and Lviv last year and watched the brutality of the assaults over the winter, I believe to be non-negotiable) and shifting how decisions are made (accountability) within a large pharmaceutical organisation.

With both industries being heavily regulated, the tensions described above are large and challenging. Creating and communicating an appropriate Decision-Making Architecture with vocabulary everybody can use becomes critical.

And of course, appearing at January Kickoff events to deliver variations of my DARE or DARE: to Lead keynotes has been a complete joy. Thank you to everybody who has invited me to share their stage.

Book of the Fortnight

This week is a short film about holding strategic tension. Steve Jobs slashing product lines on his return to apple is often cited as a case study in bold strategic discipline.

I recommend watching Jony Ive describe being mentored by Jobs on holding strategic tension – on what it means and what it feels like.

Write YOUR story 🖋️

Jim

Thought Of The Week

“Serve the Result – transformation accelerates.

Serve the boss – transformation decelerates.”

How would you persuade a child to eat their broccoli?

Some people would ‘carrot and stick’ them.  Others advocate role modelling and connecting good nutrition to being able to do all the things the child loves to do.

If we want great Decisions and Actions when we are not in the room (a great ‘culture’), we want the child to know, and want to serve, a positive Result, not a child trained to guess what the ‘boss’ wants.

It is no different for the leader wishing to turn a strategy into Decisions, Actions and Results around the world. They can either carrot and stick people, or role model the change and connect everybody to the positive Results and the strategy to deliver it.

But here’s the Broccoli Paradox: the more urgent the transformation we seek, the more we command and control it (carrot and stick).

This DOES accelerate the transformation. But only for the short term, and at the risk of burnout (burnout because everybody is now micromanaging down and second-guessing up – a massive layer of non-profitable activity).

Serving the purpose takes design, solid foundations and consistency. But it changes ‘culture’ faster than anything else I have witnessed and delivers long term, sustainable transformation

Which do your people serve:

The Boss?

Or the Result?

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Book of the Fortnight

This week I recommend a podcast. General Sir Gwyn Jenkins, leader of the UK’s Navy, seems to be genuinely committed to accelerating transformation and performance in an environment where it is traditionally slowed by rank and silos.

Here he explains how he is shifting the focus from serving the boss and protecting the silo, to serving the Result.

My Fortnight

In 2017 I was doorstepped by my next-door neighbour’s son, George Rawlings. He wanted me to invest in a startup he and his friend, Matt McNeill Love, were working on: ‘Honeypot’. Some weeks later I transferred the cash.

That company is now called Thursday. It is the largest IRL singles event organiser in the world.  This week I got time with Matt to hear their story - and what a story it is. If you’re single, or want to host world class events in your city:

If you’re single, hate dating apps and love meeting real people, Thursday was made just for you! Click the image to explore.

Is it possible to use an event to clarify strategy, build energy around it AND create brave Decisions from country managers on what it will take to deliver it in their nations?

That was the question my clients asked before last week’s event in Istanbul and after careful planning, we successfully applied the DARE Loop to the strategy, took the room outside of their comfort zone, and translated the plan into bold, local actions across the world.

The moment of truth before country managers arrive in Istanbul. Thanks to my great partner Valentin Ionescu for creating a superb match. 

And finally, to the London Speaker Bureau Christmas Cocktails. A rare treat to meet many of my closest business partners. We WhatsApp daily – but we only get to meet annually. Thank you all for your support!

Thank you to Barbara, Angelika (pictured) and the team at London Speaker Bureau globally for another fantastic year together. 

Write YOUR story 🖋️

Jim

Thought Of The Week

“We don’t resist change. We resist the loss as we walk away from the old”

When you leave the comfort zone, to build your future, you lose the things that are keeping you safe.

The Tarot card symbolising change is, after all, “Death”. We don’t want to go to rehab because it is, literally, the death of the only way of living we have known.

Change = saying goodbye to something deeply dear to us to build something we HOPE will be better. Saying goodbye is the hardest part

The CRO doesn’t pursue the high-value clients their competitors pursue because they fear losing the small clients that currently pay the bills.

The CEO won’t empower the Exec to own decisions and create a fast competitive organisation because she fears losing the illusion of control.

The CIO doesn’t courageously propose an AI-Enabled Business Strategy that changes the business model because he fears losing the ‘they just tell IT what to do’ comfort blanket (so we just build a me-too ‘AI Strategy’ to reduce contact centre headcount and we can say we’re ‘adopting AI’).

We remain in the comfort zone because of our fear of loss. Which is greater than our desire to secure our future. 

Kahneman and Loss-Aversion

Daniel Kahneman won a Nobel Prize for his work on decision making in uncertainty. For those of us who create, or advise the CEO to create, change: he is required reading.

An element of his prize-winning work is the discovery that we are all more ‘loss-averse’ than we are ‘gain-positive’.

You fear loss of the way things are today more than you fear failing to build your long-term security in a disrupted world.

We don’t resist change.

We don’t fear failure.

We resist and we fear the loss of what is currently working for us. What we have built up to now.

And so do the people you are leading.

When understood, this changes your entire approach to your change, your emotional regulation, your decision making and your leadership.

Let’s look at that with your upcoming strategic AI decisions.

AI and your potential blind spot

When the internet came along there were internet strategies and internet-enabled business strategies.

An internet strategy = playing within your comfort zone with no emotional block and nothing lost. Eg: Retailers opened an online version of their store or they went bust.

An Internet-enabled business strategy = a MOONSHOT: using new technology to change the operating model and capture value in a new way. It involves leaving the comfort zone and its comfort blanket behind.

· Netflix moves from posting DVDs to streaming (you must shut your route to market to do this).

· Banks move transactions online and close physical branches (you must shut your routes to market to do this).

· Amazon is born to defeat Barnes and Noble’s limited stock capacity (you must leave a high-paying hedge fund job and become poor and actually start coding up an online bookstore).

Internet-enabled business strategies demanded walking away from the comfort zone – not playing within it.  They were emotionally challenging to execute.

Today’s big questions:

1. Do you have an AI Strategy? Or an AI-Enabled Business Strategy?

2. What do you lose if you move from the comfort zone? What is the ‘comfort blanket’ that gets taken away.

3. How can you make intellectual decisions – not loss-averse fear-driven decisions?

If you want help with this, drop me a line.

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My Fortnight

Change Happens in your Calendar. Which means losing stuff from your calendar. Which makes the Tiger roar.

I have big changes afoot and this week the decision was made that the only way to do that is to be far less present onstage for the first quarter of 2026 in order to execute those changes excellently.

The challenge, of course, is that this is a significant portion of how I fund my family.  So Kahneman is large in my mind this week as I navigate intellectual decision making while my Tiger roars at me.

I shall, however, maintain all of my boardroom advisory clients and can accommodate two more.

Thank you to all who invited me to events this week and last. Each was very special.

A highlight however, as a Dad who is heavily invested in a secure future, and has also visited our viciously attacked European border in Ukraine, was supporting leaders working hard to ensure NATO’s underinvested defence capabilities are brought back in line with the threats faced. I look forward to seeing you all again soon.

Today to Istanbul and a dynamic leadership team in a fast growing pharma company who are in the middle of creating, successfully, a re-invention of their entire business model.

See you at LHR T5 if you’re travelling through today.  

Book Of The Fortnight

Thinking Fast and Slow: Daniel Kahneman.

I have said all I need to above I think. There are a number of books that work in this field. Tim Gallweys’ Inner Game of Tennis’ is astonishing. Guy Claxton’s “Hare Brain – Tortoise Mind” (thank you Neil Mullarkey for the recommendation) and of course the work of the behavioural economists from Cialdini to Thaler.

But this one is foundational if you want to understand leading change.

And leading yourself!

Write YOUR story 🖋️

Jim

Thought Of The Week

“You will deliver your ‘Strategy 2030’ through the daily Decisions and Actions of people who hold your strategy in their hearts, not in their title.

That makes your 2026 kick-off the strategic moment of your decade. 

Last week I sat with an American CEO overlooking a satisfyingly damp, foggy early-morning London skyline. He was loving the British ‘authenticity’ of the scene.

We were discussing how to accelerate the extremely ambitious, ‘Strategy 2030’.

I asked him a familiar question:

“Who, precisely, must take the first brave Decisions and Actions to start making Results change?”

“Honestly? mostly people I’ve never met.”

“OK, and what ways do you have to give those people:

· The emotions, energy and purpose to be brave and do new things,

· 100% clarity on WHAT they need to do differenty, and

· Permission to start doing it - without waiting for instructions

That moment captures the central challenge of ‘Strategy 2030’. We don’t win through cascading the strategy deck.

We win through the everyday decisions of people who hold the strategy in their hearts, not in their title, and will fight to deliver it. There are a variety of tools my client and I have agreed to use, and the 2026 kick-off is a vital part of our mix.

So as more and more ‘Strategy 2030’ decks come my way, I want to explain how to ensure your 2026 kick-off accelerates your 2030 success.
 

Never Underestimate The Power of Your Kick-off.

Live theatre and shared experiences build emotion and change lives across the world every day. But in my experience (Yes folks, around 60 kick-offs a year for 20+ years = over 1000 kick-off events globally), most CXO’s use their KO budget to:

1. Amuse – I leave happy, but nothing changes commercially.

2. Overwhelm – I see lots of your slides but my new Actions are unclear.

3. Command (The CXO broadcast) – I leave to await my specific commands and to serve the commander, not to serve the strategy.

The answer to generating live theatre and shared experiences is generally not to try and make a corporate event more “rock n roll”.

People take their work extremely seriously. They want purpose. They want to know how they can deliver the strategy that makes us win. We can make that a shared experience. 

Here are four ways to ensure KO 2026 accelerates your 2030 Strategy:

1. Design For Decisions (Emotional), Not Just Comprehension (Intellectual)

A kick-off is theatre. Theatre has emotion and energy. And your strategy needs emotion and energy just as much as it needs intellectual comprehension. Emotions and energy can generate moments of mass decision-making and commitment.

If you don’t engineer a space where people can Decide to take new Actions with clarity and commitment, the strategy remains a beautifully worded document. Your job is to architect the moment where people quietly decide to change their behaviour on Monday morning.

2. Make Strategy Personal — Every Single Person Must See Themselves Inside It

People will fight for what they feel personally responsible for. They won’t fight for a paragraph in a strategy document. A Strategy 2030 kick-off must create absolute clarity: what my role requires, what new Decisions and Actions I must take, and what ‘good’ looks like in real life.

This is NOT the classic 12 people round a flip chart thing. It is 1-1 coaching (to each other), it is quiet reflection in the grounds, it is 500 people putting their newly minted 2030 strategy goals – to deliver in Q1 2026 – up on the screen through an event app and committing to delivering them.

We had one event where the CEO missed dinner because he offered to hold 1-1 discussions to talk over new Actions to deliver the strategy immediately after his closing presentation. The queue to sign off strategic actions 1-1 with a man they rarely saw was huge and I had never seen him so elated.

Those inspired ‘post-theatre’ discussions reverberated around the globe through the coming year.

3. Give Explicit Permission To Act At Speed (Even When Uncertain)

If people leave feeling they must wait for alignment or approval, we’ve just slowed Strategy 2030. The kick-off must remove psychological and hierarchical brakes. Clarify boundaries, what people are empowered to decide, and where speed matters more than certainty.

Remember, NOBODY FEARS FAILURE! They fear the consequence of failure. You can make that consequence acceptable (to serious people with children to feed) from the stage.

4. Install A Shared Operating System

A moonshot strategy collapses without shared language and habits. The kick-off must install the operating system the organisation will use all year.

Know how to tell stories. Know how to install vocabulary. Don’t delegate this to ‘the people team’ if you are leading the strategy. Not everybody who knows how to make payroll, recruitment and redundancy happen seamlessly is also best qualified to coach the CXO on inspirational leadership.

I happen to be biased, but the high accountability/challenge, and practical moonshot architecture of Decision, Action, Result, Evaluate works. It also makes fertile ground for people to decide upon their bold new Actions in a workshop before they leave.

We’ve done that with 3000 people in one room – the entire audience watched in unified awed silence as the bold, strategic commitments scrolled on the screen.

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My Week

My boardroom advisory work is very close to my heart. So are the people being abused in Ukraine this week through attacks on their sons, daughters, homes and energy infrastructure. We have also seen incursions into Estonia, Poland and Belgium recently.

A new instruction to work on accelerating change and excellence in a company that is central to defending our, and Europe’s, borders was therefore very welcome. It has been deeply occupying my mind and I am very honoured to be involved.

It was an enormous pleasure to deliver a closing Keynote on Moonshot Architecture for UBS in Switzerland on Monday and to deliver keynotes for UK clients at Heathrow near London and at the fabulous Telford International Center in the English midlands.

Very grateful to the person who designed these amazing brownies while I was on stage for UBS in Switzerland.

Book Of The Week

IMPACT by my friend Dominic Colenso is a superb, practical manual if you want to generate emotion and energy around your 2030 plan in addition to intellectual understanding.

Dom is a RADA rooted theatre and TV actor (and former Thunderbird on the big screen) who works extensively with business leaders and also speaks regularly at events. He understands the theory and application, and communicates both in a way you can immediately apply (just add your courage and drive).

The book will shift your approach to presenting and teach you how to clarify your intention, simplify your message, and use presence, voice and energy to generate emotion and influence strategic action.

Write YOUR story 🖋️

Jim

Thought Of The Week

“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves”

Viktor Frankl

Can Victim Narratives Predict Problems with AI Adoption At Work?

Unless you own a dumbphone, you are bathing in stories encouraging you to give away your power to Act (‘be a victim’) and to blame others for your Results in life. In this edition of DARE I will give you the top ten victim narratives as I see them.

Why?

As AI enters our working lives, your ability to accept your POWER (avoid victimhood) and to take ACCOUNTABILITY (not blame others for your Results) will define your success.

Why?

Because you will have to adapt and lead adaptation – fast and continuously.

To adapt is courageously to use your power to leave the old way and move to the new – things you’ve never done before. (The DARE Loop)

To lead adaptation is to use your power to inspire and empower: to make others aware of, and have the courage to use their power to adapt. (The C.O.A.C.H. Framework)

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Trigger Warning

There may be ‘triggers’ in the list below.

When you are ‘triggered’ you place your power outside of yourself. By definition.

You are permitting another person to control your emotions simply by stating certain concepts. You are the ‘victim’ of his/her Actions and the Result is not yours to own (no accountability), he/she owns your Result.

Of course, there are extreme situations where triggers should be carefully avoided. For example, I have recently learned that in a high-PTSD war zone, the flame/explosion emojis signifying ‘Go you!’ to most of us, are highly ‘triggering’ and are not used.

If the list ‘triggers’ you, that could be an interesting clue about your ability to regulate your emotions and reclaim your power from some words on a screen, or even from me.

Alternatively – you can cancel me. There’s a link at the bottom of the email 😉.

Big Trigger Warning!

So here’s my list of common disempowering victim narratives. What’s on your list? Which one makes you angry with me – and is therefore likely to cause you to give your power away?

I am NOT saying that the world is fair and the list is untrue. That is a different conversation. I am asking whether adopting these narratives can assist you or prevent you in using your power to DARE and write your story in your coming AI world.

1. “I can’t — my mental health won’t allow it.”

Caring for yourself is vital. But protection easily becomes avoidance. When we have poor health, our primary task is to get well and carry our own weight again, not integrate it into our personality.

DARE: Ask, “What small, supported ACTION could I still take towards the Result I want?”

2. “The patriarchy means that… [insert block].”

Yes, there are walls for everybody (most men hold zero power in ‘the patriarchy’). But declaring defeat before the game begins cements the structure you want to change: the only way forward is to adopt and celebrate victimhood as an identity.

DARE: Master the system, then bend it. Be the architect, not the tenant.

3. “As a man, I’m not allowed emotions or vulnerability.”

Silence isn’t strength. It’s suppression. There is no man as magnetic as a man with the courage to face his fear of rejection and failure and pursue a purpose. A man with purpose is demonstrating extreme vulnerability.

DARE: Lead with both backbone and heart.

4. “It’s my diagnosis — I can’t.”

Labels can clarify the situation and the Action required or can cage. Understanding your mind could expand your toolkit, not shrink it.

DARE: Use self-knowledge to design systems that work for you.

5. “Capitalism is the problem.”

Maybe. But waiting for utopia is another way of saying, “Not my move – I have no power.”

DARE: Build the ethical enterprise you wish existed / Operate in the environment you have been given/accept what you cannot change.

6. “My culture or family wouldn’t approve.”

Belonging matters. But inherited rules are not destiny.

DARE: Honour your roots — author your future. And sometimes, (a strong theme in all spiritual practices) we must reject in order to return whole as adults.

7. “I’m protecting my boundaries.”

Important — until boundaries become walls. Growth happens where edges meet. And beware, this has come to mean ‘what I say goes’ and that is not what boundaries are

DARE: Ask, “Is this boundary safety or avoidance, or me controlling others?”

8. “Societal Expectations mean that I must…”

Except many don’t. And who, exactly, is doing this expecting? A magazine editor or an influencer? You don’t have to be ‘agreeable’ to an imagined mass. Seek different role models and inspirations.

DARE: Curate your media inputs, be clear on your values, Decide and Act.

9. “I’m manifesting — the universe will decide.”

Hope is not a strategy. The universe responds to movement.

DARE: Pair vision with Action.

10. “If I win, someone else loses.”

We’ve confused humility with hesitation and a fear of standing out and contributing. When good people play small, power flows to those who won’t.

DARE: Win with integrity — expand the circle, don’t equate shrinking yourself with  ‘being good’.

The DARE Loop

Every one of these narratives begins with truth — trauma, fatigue, inequity, pressure. But then comes the quiet surrender: “Because of that truth, I can’t.”

DARE flips it: “Because of that truth, I must.” Care deeply. Act bravely. Redesign reality — one DARE loop at a time.

My Fortnight

A week of half term bliss (I’ve obviously chosen to block out the early mornings and late nights to get my work done). I love these moments together. Amongst various adventures and conversations was a trip to see the astonishing production of Cabaret in London.

It is sobering to watch what happens when a toxic and racist narrative (European anti-semitism in the case of the play) creeps across a society, wrecking all in its path and destroying lives. #NeverAgain – for everybody.

The cast and backstage were utterly brilliant. Heartbreaking, Thought provoking. Courageous in the extreme.

Then to Egypt to train in the ocean. Always very intimidating for me to invest in the future rather than ‘do my work’. Practicing what I preach is important – but never becomes less challenging. My whole being rebels against it.

The Sinai Desert meets the Red Sea.

For the first time in 15 years I went to learn from Marco Nones (Rasta from Taming Tigers fame). With Andrea Zuccari, Marco changed freediving. Together, they coached and supported me to 101m. Since the sea claimed Andrea, Marco’s expertise, professionalism and philosophy is unmatched in my view. You can learn a little about Marco, and train with him and his team, here.

Freedive Guru Marco Nones

A question for you – would you like me to reveal what I am training for and take you on my DARE journey with me each fortnight?

Book Of The Week

Homo Delphinus – The Dolphin Within Man by Jaques Mayol

When Mayol boarded his sled to go to 100m in 1976, it was like going to the moon. He was a true pioneer.

Why? Nobody had ever experienced such pressure before. The science said his rib cage would be crushed.

The water was filled with scuba divers at different depths to help him return if injured. Doctors were present to deliver life-saving treatment to the damaged bones. Researchers were there to study what happens to humans under extreme pressure.

He learned that we became dolphins. Our bodies acted just as theirs do. We are cousins.

In Homo Delphinus, Mayol sets out his philosophy. It transcends diving:

· We are built for adaptation beyond fear.

· Mastery is achieved through surrender to and acceptance of our environment, not the struggle against it.

· Reconnecting with our natural intelligence is the path to both performance and harmony.

Write YOUR story 🖋️

Jim

DARE is the mental model for high performance and change.

You write your story through your DECISIONS, ACTIONS and RESULTS and a thorough EVALUATION of how you did.

A new Result requires new Decisions and Actions.

Thought Of The Week

“The drive to do something because it is interesting, challenging, and absorbing - is essential for high levels of creativity”

Daniel Pink

When I sit behind a closed door with a CEO, my job is to bring a clear set of sound architectural principles we can rely upon.

The CEO is deploying expensive intellectual capital to deliver a strategy in outrageous volatility at astonishing speed against outstanding competitors with fast evolving tech.

They are rarely ‘telling people what to do’ and ‘cascading the deck’ is unlikely to cut it.

They need people they’ve never met to WANT, deeply, to take brave new Decisions and Actions that will deliver their strategy – whilst the CEO is asleep on another time zone.

Two of my favourite architects’ buildings were inspiring us in my London venue this week: – Lord Foster’s ‘Gherkin’ and Lord Rogers’ 122 Leadenhall Street – ‘The Cheese Grater’

Given this, the first architectural principle I can bring to the conversation is that we are designing for intrinsic motivation and a profound connection to the strategy. We are not designing a better command system or a set of values.

If you want intrinsic motivation, and a profound connection to the strategy, there are structural things that we must do.

Certain conditions are necessary to develop intrinsic motivation in others and specific elements must be in place for people to understand and believe in the strategy. Where these are missing, we can make ground very fast.

Intrinsic motivation – the drive to do the thing because I want it done - requires three elements to be present:

• Purpose

• Autonomy

• Mastery (growth, challenge and progress)

We can use a variety of data to measure for this and we can use very precise tools and trainings to improve the situation quickly.

Performance Architecture was on the agenda in Amsterdam this week

Like building design, the architecture of transformation and performance is complex. But it is neither mysterious nor a dark art.

As a starter for you: If you want to build autonomy in others, don’t own or fix their problems. You can start by asking questions about ‘what will you do to solve it then?’  instead of giving answers.

Anybody can start playing with this change, this afternoon, with colleagues, friends and family.  

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Book Of The Week

Daniel Pink’s ‘Drive’ is still the best primer I have discovered on intrinsic motivation for practitioners (rather than academics).

Even better, you don’t need to read the last portion of the book. Here he goes into practical applications of the academic findings and, with respect to Mr Pink, of whom I am a big fan, I am not convinced he’s on the money. The first part alone, entirely worth your money.

It is a compelling thesis on what creates intrinsic motivation, why it does, and why you need to be aware of this if you run a business where you need your people to be creative and adaptable to solve problems – even when nobody is waving a carrot or a stick.

My Week

My CXO clients are giving me fabulous puzzles to solve. Details always remain confidential, but a powerful theme over these weeks has been using story to communicate and connect to strategy and accelerate change. Intricate, long term and creative work with a huge impact.

This week I was invited to address a global insurance team who gathered in London and a global pharmaceutical team gathering in Amsterdam. Thank you to both of my hosts for looking after me so very well and creating wonderful events.

In both presentations, I invited the room to relax, go inside themselves (together) and increase their freedive breath hold with me. This is a new experiment and it worked beautifully.

The improvements in breath holding are not the thing. The win is a team from four corners of the globe taking a moment to close their eyes, reflect on the strategy and their ‘bold actions’ and breath together as one.

In London and Amsterdam, the groups became a single organism as they synchronised and slowed their breathing before committing, together, to bold change.

Having taken soundings from a number of DARE readers, the feedback has been to write a shallower, shorter newsletter or to make it fortnightly.

So, from this week onwards, your DARE newsletter will become fortnightly rather than weekly.

We are doing important work you and I. So we continue to dive to the depths!

Write YOUR story 🖋️

Jim

DARE is the mental model for high performance and change.

You write your story through your DECISIONS, ACTIONS and RESULTS and a thorough EVALUATION of how you did.

A new Result requires new Decisions and Actions

Thought Of The Week

“Indifference is what kills. The illusion of distance and the hope that the crocodile will eat you last.”

Volodymyr Zelensky 

(So many people helped to make this trip possible and showed me great kindess. Apologies to those I have not mentioned, please do not think that any detail of your kindness was not noticed)

My grandmother would mimic the noise of the doodlebugs, Hitler’s deadly drones that fell on her town, her eyes wide, re-living her terror before me, trying to make me understand. I was six years old and it worked. I’ve never forgotten.

Years pass but the tactic of the coward remains the same. Scare, disrupt, wear down the children, the mothers and the fathers as you seek to bolster your ego through violence.

I visited Ukraine, the cities of Lviv and Kyiv from 3 – 8 October. It was so profound that I cannot write about anything else this week and my newsletter will only share stories from this visit.

Taming Tigers is popular in Ukraine. Currently it is outselling the Hunger Games. My daughter almost thinks I am cool.

My Ukrainian royalties are shared between Unbroken and Gen.Ukrainian.

I went to Lviv and Kyiv to show friendship and to bring Ukrainians’ daily reality to a wider audience – to share their stories outside of Ukraine and with you. That was all.

Visiting Unbroken is a life changing experience 

On the night of 4^th October, Russia sent more than 50 Ballistic missiles and over 500 drones into Ukraine. In Lviv, we spent the night in a shelter, the floor vibrating. Four civilians in the city did not survive the night, the youngest murdered was 15.

A map of Russian missiles entering Ukraine on the night 4-5 October. Lviv is the cluster of explosions to the West. The activity was so brutal that Poland scrambled fighter jets to protect herself.

Unbroken

Some of the men who told me their stories at Unbroken in Lviv

Unbroken kindly invited me to visit them and spend time with the patients who are undergoing rehabilitation.

It is a hard visit. The tears cannot come whilst you are there. The patients deserve better. But come they will, later, behind your hotel door.

I was shown world class facilities for helping people to begin walking with prosthetics, make a bed and cook with one arm, manage their terror and trauma. The attention to every detail was inspiring. I was not taken to the building where those who have been tortured by Russians are cared for.

Even the site map at Unbroken is sobering.

Roman was blunt: “I was never afraid of being killed. I was afraid of being a ‘missing person’. I saw friends die and we could not rescue their bodies. This means they are ‘missing’ and their families receive no money. I did not want my wife and my children to have no money’.

The terrors of fatherhood are universal; but few of us must consider them whilst being bombed in a forest trench.

Roman is not some fictional figure. He had a career and the ability to walk. The scars that map across his shaven skull evidence further brutalities that I did not ask about for fear of hurting him further.

The Lviv BookForum And The Night Of 4th October 2025

You’re never too young to Tame a Tiger

That Ukraine can host a magnificent Book Festival – Lviv BookForum – in the midst of a full-scale invasion and nightly air raids, tells you everything about the character of the nation. And the crowds were huge!

Olha Mukha hosts “The time is out of joint’ panel discussion at the Lviv BookForum.

On the night of the 4^th , after a wonderful day celebrating literature, philosophy, language and humanity at the Lviv BookForum, the thugs sent their cultural contribution.

I wrote the following words in the shelter as a post for Instagram and I will share them with you here:

The Lviv Air Raids: 4-5 October 2025

There are children sleeping beside me on our row of hard chairs. Their heads on their mother’s laps.

The mothers are not asleep. The ground is vibrating hard and even in the basement the explosions are intimidatingly loud. They stare into the distance. In our narrow basement corridor, ‘the distance’ is less than a meter away.

4/10/25. The floors and walls vibrated and the enormous sounds intimidated – for many long hours.

The Russians are very brave, hurling explosives at mothers and children. They work at night, as thieves do.

Women who had no time to dress cover their night clothes with blankets distributed by the bright eyed, smiling night porter who is serving his guests a full cup of reassurance and cheer.

They started their brave bombing at 3.50. It is now 7.00.

They are targeting Lviv hard on a Saturday night whilst it hosts many extra visitors at its annual BookForum.

Books scare bullies.

It is very easy to be a guest here. Ukrainians are very hospitable and extremely kind.

When basements become air raid shelters, the streets change mood.

Yuliya, my volunteer Lviv BookForum host, left Lviv at 5pm on Friday night, crossing into Poland at 9pm to meet me at Przemysl, on the station platform. She queued for 2 hours to exit Ukraine. She queued another 2 hours with me at the Polish border to re-enter. We got to our beds in Lviv at 3am on Saturday morning.

The last text I received from her was 5 mins ago. She has spent the night on her bathroom floor (safest room in her house) with her tiny daughter.

She’s been in constant touch with me since the sirens began to ensure that I am safe and to share updates from the insiders’ Telegram channels. ChatGPT translates the screenshots for me down here. I am deep in a basement and she is in a bathroom with her child, but she’s concerned for my safety?

My guardian angel in Lviv, Yuliya Yurshenko.

The woman to my left in the shelter looks to be in her early thirties. We’ve all been sitting in silence for hours. Suddenly she gets up, calls the lift and leaves. She just leaves!

Perhaps she’s had enough of the airless basement. Perhaps she’s going to go outside and breath the air and scream at the missiles in the sky. Perhaps she is just going back to her bed for warmth and sleep and to hell with the risk?

She returns after five minutes with a coffee, and one for me too. Her kindness embarrasses me. I am cross with myself for not even thinking that I could have gone to get her a coffee. And so I receive yet more Ukrainian kindness and I make another Ukrainian friend. Tetyana.

Tetyana. Who turned an air raid shelter into a place of friendship and kindness.

But it’s easy to be a guest. It is less easy to be a citizen.

It is not my city being bombed above our heads by another rogue nation of expansionist, colonialist thugs. Although at least these thugs are not permitted to play football with civilised people.

It is not my husband at the front line or in the rehab centre learning how to walk on two prosthetic legs or prepare dinner with one arm.

It is not my child asleep in a corridor with their head on my lap. My child is sleeping safely in the UK.

She is safe, for as long as Ukrainians defend Europe’s borders.

Kyiv

Ukrainian Railways have earned their global reputation for resilience the hard way. As the 12.48 to Kyiv leaves Lviv station, at 12.48 precisely, you understand why. Aged Soviet rolling stock runs on lines that are being bombed: on time and with smiling service from the guards.

We disembark into a station that could serve as a ballroom. Kyiv-Pasazhyrskyi is an art deco wonder with painted ceiling panels and a huge 2025 artwork by Lesia Khomenko dominating the wall above the exit. 

Kyiv-Pasazhyrskyi Station – A Ballroom

I have a day of media appointments arranged through my Ukrainian publisher Bookchef and their quite wonderful press officer, the journalist Irina Milichenko.

The book signing that evening is at Knyharnya Ye. I have a 40-minute session with the audience being interviewed by Channel 24 News Anchor, Nataly Lutsenko.

Nataly is a wonderful interviewer. Then came the questions from the audience, which are just beautiful. From people running businesses to people wanting to get fit, learn a new skill and write a book. The questions are as they always are all around the world.

People want to grow and develop, test themselves and have adventures, care for their businesses, teams and families.

And Ukrainians are no different!

So I will always remember, when my Tiger is roaring at me to pull back on my dreams, it is not roaring on 3 hours’ sleep and the risk of an air raid in my place of work. It is not roaring with no electricity – again – or with the water turned off.

Thank you to all the people of Ukraine for your kindness and your courage and for holding the borders of Europe safe. Thank you.

My guardian angel, Yuliya, sent some dark Ukrainian humour during the air raid: the truth she has to create for herself and her little daughter:  it’s all fine..

As Olha Mukha, Lviv Book Forum organiser, my interviewer onstage and now my friend said:

“In Ukraine, the comfort zone has left the chat.’

 Write YOUR story 🖋️

 Jim.

DARE is the mental model for high performance and change.

You write your story through your DECISIONS, ACTIONS and RESULTS and a thorough EVALUATION of how you did.

A new Result requires new Decisions and Actions.

Thought Of The Week

“The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times…. The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to it’s limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile”

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

This week I worked with a highly successful leadership team in Oman. Flow, and how to create it, was a theme of our week. Muscat sits on the Gulf of Oman with its deep, still, warm water and I managed to keep one afternoon free to freedive into the Gulf.

As we sailed back from our dive site, we spotted spinner dolphins playing half a mile off our port side, so naturally we went to greet them.

They were leaping and twisting in the air, perfectly formed Aquadarts of muscle and joy but as soon as they noticed us coming, they all changed course in unison and rushed over to play.

You can watch them on my Instagram feed here.

They moved fast and in flow, the whole pod adapting the plan together without words or ‘sign offs’. Eventually they were bored with us and went off together, leaping over each other and spinning through 360 degrees in the air as they breached.

Last week I introduced the idea of creating an organisation that is a courageous, fast-moving, adaptable, organism rather than a slow, commanded and controlled machine: an organisation inspired, perhaps, more by dolphins than by clocks.

The spinners showed many of the things we humans need in order to operate in flow:

1. Complete concentration on the task – truly absorbed and lost in it.

2. Clarity of ‘goals’ and immediate feedback form their work – they leap, they land, they swim, they interact with the dolphin racing beside them.

3. No concept of time – I’m not a spinner dolphin but these relatives of ours seemed LOST in their play!

4. An experience that was intrinsically rewarding, had an end itself. They seemed to need nothing more but would not have permitted anything less.

5. An effortlessness and an ease about them.

6. A balance between challenge and skills – they were clearly loving pushing themselves to max speed with mighty gymnastic leaps to play with the boat – and keep our speed - but without pushing into stress.

7. Actions and awareness that were merged, had they been humans – there would have been no self-conscious internal judgement.

8. A feeling of utter control over the task.

These are, of course, Csikszentmihalyi’s characteristics of flow.

Dear Ukrainian Readers – I will be heading from Lviv to Kyiv tomorrow and we can meet in Kyiv at Knyharnya Ye on Levka Lukianenka Street at 18:30 on Tuesday 7^th October.

Please come along. All royalties from the Ukrainian edition of ‘Go where it is scary’ are divided equally between Unbroken and Gen.Ukrainian 

How, then, can we create an organism in FLOW and not a machine second guessing the cog above, but feeling unsafe to ask for permission to act – all the while downing tools every twenty minutes to answer emails ‘fast’.

The answer is, of course, a live, bespoke and iterative year long piece of work following on from careful data analysis, not a Sunday morning coffee thought provoker.

But I didn’t want that to stop me from getting our juices flowing! So here are just a few questions to help you reflect:

1  Do I even allow deep concentration on the task and the outcomes or are we a performative ‘answer fast’ and ‘notifications on’ interruption culture?

2  Is it exciting to visit me as a manager, or that beating, energising heart of the organism – the exec team - can I be in flow and on my ‘A Game’ with them or do I have to be scared and self-conscious?

3  Do I connect my people to the difference they make in the world, the value of the results they produce?

4  And is it fun?

My client, now friends, this week in Muscat were masterful and mischievous at creating fun and laughter whilst delivering world class quality and service in incredibly complex and technical projects.

That’s not my natural strength. I can take it all too seriously. So thank you to my new friends, and to the spinner dolphins of Oman, for making me reflect on how we can generate flow: and fun.

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My Week

When a legendary founder born into extreme poverty dies, the next generation of owners come from a very different start. They are under unimaginable pressures and powered by a different fuel.

How can we see the legacy of the generation before not as the defining achievement that it was in its day – but as the foundations of greater achievements to come? And how does an executive team bring in process to recruit and grow – whilst embedding the pioneering spirit and speed?

That was the challenge we took on together at the start of the week with great progress made and decisions taken.

My week ends as you read this at the Lviv BookForum today (and yesterday) and a life changing visit to Unbroken before taking the train to Kyiv tomorrow: precisely as I promised I would when the event was cancelled earlier this year.

Book Of The Week

One of the most strategic thinkers I know, and a thought leader in the implementation of technology, especially AI, is Benedetto Conversano - my great friend, and also the (recently) former CIO of Diageo.

For some years now I have been influenced by the ideas in Playing to Win by Roger Martin and A.G.Lafley which was recommended to me by Benedetto.

There is a lot of confusing nonsense around strategy. Playing to Win gives you a solid structure which I find consistently useful ‘in real life’.

The most compelling reason for exploring the book is that Lafley (when CEO of P&G) and Martin (his strategy thinking partner) used the approach repeatedly and successfully with billions of dollars at stake.

(As you know, I don’t much like reading an advisory book unless the author went to the trouble of proving their approach in the real world – preferably under significant ‘pressure’  😉.)

DARE is the mental model for high performance and change.

You write your story through your DECISIONS, ACTIONS and RESULTS and a thorough EVALUATION of how you did.

A new Result requires new Decisions and Actions.

Thought Of The Week

“Greater uncertainty ahead brings the absolute certainty that you will need courage, speed, adaptability and tolerance* in your organisational design.”

*How far you can stretch things/make errors before you break something.

How do you prepare your organisation for a future that is more uncertain than ever?

This question has dominated my shared airport rides, dinners, meetings and design engagements with senior leaders in the past decade.

While the nuance will change the core principle is constant:

“We need to move from a slow command-and-control machine to a courageous, fast moving, adaptable organism.”

From that foundation, I watch leaders then move forward in one of two directions:

Direction 1 Command that everybody is fully empowered to do as they are told - faster. The leader then broadly resumes their previous calendar of activities.

Direction 2  Design a shift in decision making authority and begin building the courage in others to own and take those Decisions and Actions. The leader and entire exec team then change their calendar actions.

So what are those of us engaged in designing and building the shift to ‘organisms’ actually doing?

We are creating a situation where each individual human, each cell in the organism, has the drive, skill, strategic clarity, permission and courage to Decide and Act to deliver the best Result and the psychological safety and humility to Evaluate their progress.

Architecting this shift requires two things: 

1               Helping (requiring) each individual cell to discover the courage and mindset to DARE (unlearning decades of ‘command and control’ emotional responses and narratives).

And

2               Changing each leader’s mindset to one of ensuring clarity and consistency of: Results required; permissions to act; safety in the case of errors as we learn; and constant inspiration towards building a future that matters.

It is a symmetrical change.

It’s detailed work, but as a high level measure of where you are at, let’s end with a question for reflection.

An outcome of our design work is an exec/senior team that DESIRES feedback at the end of each visit to their meeting room by a more ‘junior’ colleague.

They are hungry to know whether their colleague felt clear, empowered and inspired to act when they left the exec team meeting.

How would you / your senior leaders rank on this metric?

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My Week

I have spent 25 years watching businesses move from start-up to maturity. The moment when you must hire people, often subject matter experts, from bigger, slower organisations to join the carefully nurtured community of disruptors is a critical juncture.

This week I was in Barcelona with a team from Travelperk, Spain’s most exciting tech start up on many measures. They delivered a masterclass in navigating that ‘critical juncture’ and the commitment onstage from senior leaders and from Atomico, their PE Partners, was inspiring.

I particularly enjoyed COO, JC Taunay-Bucalo’s straight-shooting and wonderfully personal presentation. He gave a powerful set of permissions to everybody in the room to challenge in the pursuit of high performance and to expect and accept a degree of chaos as they did.

You can follow JC and his adventures through his LinkedIn account here.

Every success to you all and thank you for your hospitality.

I am in Oman at the start of next week with an ambitious leadership team embarking on a rapid growth journey through a major transformation. Then to Ukraine for the Lviv Bookforum and on to Kyiv. Much of this week has been filled with preparation.

And I am finally regaining my own consistency in training after a disrupted summer. No excuses. Dropped (50% of) the ball. Now I’m back on it. You can follow me on Strava and please give me some stick if I fail to show up!

Night time approach into Barcelona

Book Of The Week

In Barcelona this week “Working Backwards” by Colin Bryar and Bill Carr was mentioned. It is a book I devoured a year or so ago.

You may or may not like Amazon or it’s founder Jeff Bezos. You cannot dispute their courage, speed, adaptability or tolerance.

So how was that built in by design? Especially as they began recruiting experts from other established, slower cultures to accelerate their speed and growth. Working Backwards helps to explain how they did it.

NB: This is a technical, careful book. It’s more “Good to Great’ and less a Walter Isaacson style page-turner biography of a founder.

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DARE is the mental model for high performance and change.

You write your story through your DECISIONS, ACTIONS and RESULTS and a thorough EVALUATION of how you did.

A new Result requires new Decisions and Actions.

Thought Of The Week

“Soon we will stream knowledge like we stream Netflix or Spotify.” 

Dr Kjell Nordstrom, Helsinki 17 Sept 2025

Welcome to everybody joining the DARE Newsletter from wonderful events in Helsinki, Athens, Berlin and London this week.

I was fortunate to follow Kjell onstage in Helsinki this week.  This line made me think.

You see, I have long been impatient for the day when I could, for example, stream the knowledge of whether a skin mark on my body is malignant or not.

Why should accessing this knowledge require a three week wait, a morning off work and the opinion of an overworked human with no time to read the relevant research?

If it is malignant, then the doctor’s role becomes vital.

So what will you offer when your knowledge is streamed to everybody? I think the answer may be simple and exciting, but also challenging.

Your market is crowded with people who ‘know it’. Every market is.

Your market has a scarcity of those with the courage, drive and care to ‘do it’. Every market does.

Mind The Gap Between Knowing And Acting

Courage, drive and care are FREE, if challenging, resources. Knowledge has always been valued as the scarce, exclusive resource.

When knowledge is no longer exclusive: courage, drive and action become the scarce resources.

This is not to cheapen knowledge in any way. Knowledge is vital. Study is essential. Rather by democratising the availability of knowledge, we will increase the value of actually USING it.

British midwifery is in crisis. I read about each month and I know it to my family’s cost. But every midwife has passed the exam.

Most execs have gone on a course to gain the knowledge to present. But I watch many (not all!) anaesthetise the people at events every week. It takes great courage and drive to act on the knowledge imparted in the course and change how you behave onstage.

But you could stream all of my professional ‘presenting knowledge’ to a person with the drive and care to influence change, and they’ll courageously change how they present without needing the live course.

Therefore, having reflected on this, I have decided to make available all my presenting knowledge to you for free. Will you DARE to use that knowledge onstage?

All My Presenting Knowledge – Streamed to YOU for free

I have found selling in my newsletter an unpleasant barrier to the message. So I have stopped that.

But now I have a world class presentation skills course being wasted because I won’t advertise it.

So, I am making everything I know about presenting available for YOU on my Jim Lawless Youtube Channel, for free, week by week over the coming months.

Sign up to my YouTube channel to be the first to hear as new films go up.

COURAGE and DRIVE are FREE

There is a cost in choosing to be exposed and authentic, rather than a ‘smart arse’ (the guy demonstrating all the knowledge at the coffee machine, but none of the drive or courage to act).

But apart from that: it is free of charge to cross the Gap and turn Knowledge into Action.

Lviv Book Festival

I am being interviewed, and am on panels, at the Lviv BookForum in Ukraine on 3rd and 4th October before heading on to speak in Kyiv. All royalties I receive from the Ukrainian edition of my book go to Gen.ukrainian and Unbroken.

It would be fantastic to see you there.

My Week

I had an incredibly rewarding and stimulating week working with international lawyers in Berlin, cutting edge tech people in Athens and high energy TV pros at MTV in Helsinki.

The common themes were growth, change, creating their own futures rather than having them dictated and generating the shared ambition to deliver excellence: together. The hunger to keep moving and building, learning and trying, were moving and inspiring.

However much I miss humanity, humility and self-awareness on the global stage, I find it more and more present in the sports and business professionals I work with.  Thank you.

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Book of The Week

Kjell Nordstrom also gave a stark warning about the human being’s ability to absorb, and act in response to, narratives: whether or not the narrative is true.

I have been improving my understanding of the Middle East (West Asia as many non-Europeans know the region) these past weeks.

My book recommendations are James Barr’s “A Line in the Sand” and T E Lawrence’s “Seven Pillars of Wisdom”. They are good companion works and the styles so different that when you need a break from one you can turn to the other.

I can warmly recommend both books to you.

Lawrence, especially, reminds the reader that prose is an art worthy of our attention and care. The man could write!

If you know other factual books on the region I should read, please do send your recommendations.

Keep This Stock Ticker on Your Watchlist

They’re a private company, but Pacaso just reserved the Nasdaq ticker “$PCSO.”

No surprise the same firms that backed Uber, eBay, and Venmo already invested in Pacaso. What is unique is Pacaso is giving the same opportunity to everyday investors. And 10,000+ people have already joined them.

Created a former Zillow exec who sold his first venture for $120M, Pacaso brings co-ownership to the $1.3T vacation home industry.

They’ve generated $1B+ worth of luxury home transactions across 2,000+ owners. That’s good for more than $110M in gross profit since inception, including 41% YoY growth last year alone.

And you can join them today for just $2.90/share. But don’t wait too long. Invest in Pacaso before the opportunity ends September 18.

Invest While You Still Can

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DARE is the mental model for high performance and change.

You write your story through your DECISIONS, ACTIONS and RESULTS and a thorough EVALUATION of how you did.

A new Result requires new Decisions and Actions.

Thought Of The Week

“Delay is dangerous”

Julius Caesar

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My Week

I made a big commitment to a new project over the summer. I can’t tell you much about it yet, but as soon as I am happy to make it public, you’ll be the very first to know. It is already taking a lot of planning and creating a lot of change in my Decisions, Actions and Calendar entries.

Precious time with a special friend I had, somehow, not seen in 5 years this week. It was immediately intimate again although we’ve both learned and moved a lot in that half decade. And a happy daughter is beginning to feel at home in her new school community and is growing in confidence each day.

I spoke at two outstanding events. One in Belgrade and one in London. Both dynamic, ambitious and a huge pleasure. Thank you to both teams for your invitations and to the audiences for your fabulous hospitality and your huge energy!

Speed: In Belgrade this week it seems I moved faster than my livestream!

Book of The Week

If you are intrigued to know how Caesar overthrew the seemingly safe and timeless Roman Republic, you may enjoy Robert Harris’  Cicero Trilogy as much as I did. I’ve just finished reading it for the second time to help me reflect (in a gripping, ‘pageturner’ way) on the changes to domestic and international law, and law enforcement, that we are witnessing.

A work of historical fiction, it gives you a grounding in the events of Cicero’s life. Born into the stable Roman Republic (loosely a democracy but dominated by aristocratic families), Cicero lived to see Rome ruled by a dictator who believed he was a god and used his army to override principles of governance and the rule of law.