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Free thoughts, tips and tools for operational business leaders with 50 - 500 staff
About
A business leader for business leaders
A business leader for business leaders
I am lucky to have had such a broad career in business leadership. My BSc (Eng) First class at Imperial, London and my MBA at Cranfield were a great foundation and since then I have learnt so much more through practical experience - albeit often the hard way!
I have led six businesses as General manager, Managing Director or Chief Executive. Earlier in my career I led departments, business units and projects. I was responsible for selling and leading numerous corporate transformation projects worth £1M+ as well as leading a division of a well known business consultancy specialising in Hypergrowth businesses.
Three of the businesses I ran were small and I was the owner of two. Three more businesses were medium sized with up to £50M revenues and 500 staff. In all three cases I was appointed to address slowing or declining revenues and enable growth. Of the three larger businesses I ran, one was a corporate subsidiary, one an AIM listed business and one a family business.
I have led the integration of businesses following mergers six times and completed two acquisitions from start to finish.
I have been on 19 boards, eleven of them commercial, and eight in public and charity sectors. I have created and chaired three trusts, one an employee ownership (EO) trust. I was a National Leader of Governance for the Department for Education and have twice been a board advisor guiding the governance of a small enterprise.
I have facilitated over 800 meetings of business leaders, roughly half of them online and the rest in person and engaged in close confidential conversation about business challenges with over 300 different business leaders. I have arranged and hosted over 500 workshops with over 200 different professional speakers.
"Bob successfully led the business through a period of intense organisation change. During this difficult time he displayed a number of strong professional leadership qualities, including dedication and determination. He led the transformation of this company with an innovative and dynamic approach, which achieved the desired results of making the business the most successful IT Training Company at the time."
Just one of many LinkedIn recommendations
Today?
Today?
I am semi-retired because whilst I have exited my own business and no longer have an operational leadership role I remain passionate about practical leadership of real operational businesses.
I learnt so much the hard way myself and then so much more from all the business leaders I worked with.
Contributing to their debates about the real challenges they faced in their businesses has given me so many INSIGHTS into how real, practical operational business leaders think, decide and act.
Insights I wish I'd had forty years ago.
Insights I feel it's my duty to share as widely as possible!
Sharing useful stuff
My intention now is to
Share what I have learnt as widely as I can. Stuff I wish I’d known forty years ago as I set out on my management and then leadership career. Intuitively useful thoughts, tips and tools that I’ve found helpful myself and/or seen other real business leaders use effectively.
Give you, the operational business leader, tools you can use to deal effectively with whatever challenges you encounter in your business. So you cope and adapt. So your business survives and thrives.
Helping you succeed
My goal is that you, the operational business leader, leave any interaction with me able to
Save time and money
by
making fewer mistakes and avoiding dead-ends some of us discovered the hard way
taking shortcuts to success that some of us oldies have found useful
and
Become an even more competent, confident and motivated business leader
Are able to lead your business to even more success with even less stress for yourself
My beliefs and values about business
My beliefs and values about business
Today’s world is a VUCA world. It is volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous.
It conspires to confuse and behave unpredictably. We should (as an academic called Nassim Nicholas Taleb and a popular journalist called Tim Harford) suggest, stop trying to predict and forecast and plan so much. Rather than try to plan for all outcomes, and find the one that happens is the one we didn’t plan for, we need to increase the number of tools we have in our toolbag so we can cope with whatever happens.
My belief
We need to focus our efforts on building resilience and the ability to adapt. In ourselves and our business. So we cope and our businesses survive and thrive whatever. I encourage you to spend less time developing complex long term plans, on spreadsheets, on forecasting and on planning and budgeting and more time on learning how to deal with whatever life throws at you.
My learning
I’ve learnt that business doesn’t need to be complicated. The best businesses, the best leaders and the best decisions generally share the characteristic of being clear and simple.
My broader beliefs and values about leadership and the purpose of business and enterprise
My broader beliefs and values about leadership and the purpose of business and enterprise
Business should be a force for good in the world, creating value by solving challenges the world faces. Solving them so well that its customers are pleased to pass a fair share of that value on to the business.
The business in turn shares fairly that value between its staff, its investors and funders, its suppliers and its wider community.
(Where the term business includes all forms of enterprise private, public and third sector as the purpose of all should be to create value and share it fairly.)
Leaders make a difference. The person who has the greatest impact on the extent to which an organisation creates value is the leader of that organisation.
Leadership is a learning journey. None of us is the finished article - the perfect leader. However good a leader we are, we can always be even better. We succeed or we learn.We get things right - and we succeed. We make mistakes - and we learn. Whatever happens we become an even better leader. We learn from experience!
We can learn quicker. By being hungry for ideas from fellow leaders, specialists, experts and thinkers. By sharing best practice and learning from the experience of diverse others. Learning from their successes and their mistakes and they learning from ours.
We are stronger together. Sharing journeys. Comparing experiences. Learning from successes and mistakes. Supporting and challenging. Helping each other to be the best we can be.
We are individual leaders. Equal but different. People of varying genders, races, backgrounds, education, physical and mental characteristics. Leaders at different stages of our career with varying personalities, attitudes, beliefs, values and goals. We have different types of leadership role and operate within a variety of ownership structures and ownership ambitions. Our organisations are at different stages of development targeting different purposes with differing business models in a range of sectors and geographies.
We are all though equal - all peers. Striving to be the best leader we can be. Striving to run the best and most successful business we can.
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