Brand Of The Month: Lucky Saint
My brand of the month for May is Lucky Saint, for using product development to stretch their brand. Brand stretch is the idea that a brand can extend into adjacent […]
Dear Ken Cheng: What Would You Say In Your Automated Out-Of-Office Message?
Our resident corporate Agony Uncle, CEO Ken Cheng, tackles business challenges – so you don’t have to Dear Ken Cheng, What would you say in your automated Out-of-office message? – […]
The Five Lenses Of High Stakes
How are we in May? Seriously. The year is flying, and every senior leader I am speaking with is saying the same thing, that there is no time to breathe, […]
The Lost Art Of Customer Centricity
Ask any marketing leader whether their company is customer centric. Almost all will say yes. It’s on the values poster. It’s in company meetings. It’s in the job specs. But […]
Every Transformation Methodology I’ve Used Told Me How To Execute. None Told Me What To Build.
That worked when three assumptions held. What got reported up was trustworthy. Intelligence applied properly produced sound judgement. And good people could overcome a mediocre system. All three are now […]
Dear Ken Cheng: How Do I Convince My Boss To Fix The Water Supply?
Our resident corporate Agony Uncle, CEO Ken Cheng, tackles business challenges – so you don’t have to Dear Ken Cheng, The water supply has been shut off for several days […]
Dear Ken Cheng: Should I Tell My Employees Their Data Has Been Leaked?
Our resident corporate Agony Uncle, CEO Ken Cheng, tackles business challenges – so you don’t have to Dear Ken Cheng, Help! I just learned that our entire employees’ database got […]
The Key To Success In The Age Of AI Is Human Skills
To celebrate the launch of LinkedIn’s first ever book, Open to Work: How To Get Ahead In The Age of AI, Tim Clancy from LinkedIn is offering Little Grey Cells […]
Dear Ken Cheng: My Daughter Doesn’t Pick Successful Role Models
Our resident corporate Agony Uncle, CEO Ken Cheng, tackles business challenges – so you don’t have to Dear Ken Cheng, I’m worried my child is picking bad books as inspiration […]
Eight Things I Keep Coming Back To…
I’ve been delivering leadership mentoring for 25 years, and recently, having also spent a significant amount of time in conversation with exceptional leaders as research for my book, I found myself returning to the same eight observations I have been considering for most of my career. They are not new, but they are still true, largely unaddressed and still quietly costing senior leaders and teams more than they realise. What struck me most is how consistently the same gaps appear regardless of sector, seniority or the size of the organisation. The faces change, the patterns don’t. So, in this article, and in the spirit of giving back, I am sharing them with you. The 8 Principles of High Performance These eight principles sit underneath everything when it comes to success or struggle as a senior leader. The role clarity that gets skipped, the self-trust that gets overlooked, the recovery that gets sacrificed and the leadership identity that never quite gets deliberately built. 1. The leadership development industry is obsessed with WHY, and it is leaving HOW unattended. I gave a TEDx talk about this, because I was genuinely frustrated watching brilliant leaders get sold purpose as the answer when the real gap was always in the execution. Knowing your why matters, but I have sat across from hundreds of leaders who know their why perfectly well, and yet are still struggling, because nobody has ever helped them get underneath HOW they actually lead. 2. Assumption is the single biggest saboteur of high performance at senior level, and nobody talks about it. When you reach the C-suite, everyone around you assumes the foundations are in place; Role clarity, Emotional regulation, sustainable Energy, a deliberately defined Leadership style. But, I am yet to meet a senior leader who has genuinely mastered all four without deliberate focus and work. Nobody checks and the higher you climb, the less support you get to strengthen them. This is exactly where performance quietly starts to erode without anyone quite being able to name why. 3. Most senior leaders cannot confidently answer the question “what’s your job?” Not the title, not the vague brief from three years ago, but what they are really there to deliver, and what rhythm genuinely serves their performance. When I ask this question (and I ask it a lot), voices drop and body language shifts, because what comes back is something that is being constructed in the […]