Everyone’s a philosopher. Until the client calls.

Every morning, LinkedIn hands me a leadership lesson from a person I met once beside a coffee machine. Yesterday they were looking for the revised deck. Today they have discovered resilience.

“Success is a journey.” Fine. At 11:58 p.m. the journey is usually from FINAL_v7 to FINAL_v7_USE_THIS_ONE. It has not made me a better person, but the file did eventually open.

I like honest accounts of work: what went wrong, who fixed it, what the team would change. There is something useful in that. A photograph of your shoes beside a vague paragraph about purpose is less useful, unless you sell shoes.

The agency version is particularly impressive. We can turn a delayed approval into a parable about patience while three people are quietly waiting for the approval.

My contribution to thought leadership: ask a good question, answer the email, give credit to the people who did the work and send the correct file.

Then pay the invoice on time. It will inspire the entire team without a single hashtag.