Mark Carney , the Prime Minister of Canada, wrote his much-discussed speech for the latest WEF gathering in Davos himself. That’s news, sadly enough… Stephen Bush  of the  Financial Times  recently devoted a  column  to it. His observation: the Canadian Prime Minister turns out to be better not only at central banking, campaigning and ice hockey than Bush himself, he can also write. Annoying. But Bush makes a more fundamental point. A point I see confirmed time and again in m

Why Leaders Who Can Make Sense of Chaos Matter More Than Ever. The news is flying at us, but what’s really happening?On Monday evening, 19 January,   Beatrice de Graaf  and Mart de Kruif appeared on Eva Jinek’ s programme. Whilst viewers were being bombarded with news reports about Greenland, Venezuela and European threats, the historian and the general did what leaders ought to do: they helped us see what was actually happening. No panic. No easy conclusions. Simply: perspec

For a few years now, I've been sending you book recommendations before the summer and Christmas holidays, a chance to clear your head and discover fresh perspectives. In previous editions,  Summer Reading 2025: Books on AI, Unpredictability and Leadership  and  Books to Pause and Reflect On , the focus was largely on AI, geopolitics and personal development. Those pieces are still available on the  BrightHeads website ; most of those titles remain well worth reading this wint

Last January I wrote about Laloux and what AI does to our view of people in organisations. In April I looked at the Wild West of LLM use, where employees experiment while company policy lags behind. This time it is less about tools and more about the bet you are placing on the kind of AI future your organisation is heading towards. Gillian Tett makes an important point in the Financial Times . Current Big Tech valuations rest on a seductively simple idea: today’s large lan

Reading time for this blog: 3 minutes Return: at least 3 hours per week... We know it, but we do it anyway: meetings are the national sport. A full diary feels like status, and "let's schedule something" is the corporate version of hitting snooze. Meanwhile, hours evaporate, decisions are outsourced to "next time", and everyone leaves with action points without owners. Why do we inflict this upon ourselves? Because no one is held accountable for the cost of twelve people read

At times, Europe feels like a museum of its own success. The streets are lined with monuments to past prosperity; the meeting rooms filled with committees trying to preserve it. And yet, there is one persistent problem that no taskforce, green deal or recovery fund seems able to solve: structural economic growth. Germany, France and Italy, three of Europe’s largest economies, have for years struggled with stagnating productivity and sluggish technological progress. The decisi

Personal communication, nowadays fashionably called "storytelling", gathering the best people around you and visualising the goal on the...

Holidays are there, also, to create distance from the daily grind. To take time for yourself and your loved ones, to recover and to...

For several years now, I've been sending book title suggestions for the winter and summer holidays, and the responses have always been...

Organisational culture – or 'corporate culture' – is a much-discussed topic. Various studies underscore its importance. But what exactly...

At the beginning of this month, in April, the President of the United States, Donald Trump, managed to plunge the global economy into a...

It is striking that the use of LLMs – large language models – remains unstructured in so many organisations. Or, indeed, not used at all....

Previously, I wrote about families with businesses and issues surrounding succession to next generations. For example, in my newsletter...

" Reinventing Organizations " by Frederic Laloux has been featured in my newsletters before. Laloux's vision on the development of...

As the calendar year draws to a close, I am pleased to share a selection of book titles that might be inspiring, engaging,...

The end of the year is approaching. This is often a time to reflect on how the past year has gone and to consider what the new year may...

Recently, I spoke with someone who leads a family office. There are numerous variations on this theme.  Nicolai Tangen , the head of...

Welcome back after the summer holidays. I hope you have had a wonderful summer time, both for yourself and with your loved ones.  Now,...

Q2 is almost behind us. Time for a report. But not a financial one or anything like that, rather a qualitative one about what’s happening...

Loyal readers will recognise this particular bugbear of mine. Past successes are no guarantee for the future! How often have I...