leading with skill
Not for sale. Ask me for a copy.
The META Approach to Leadership Development. Make the shift from passive content to active capability.
I didn’t write this book to sell books. I wrote it for the people carrying this problem inside organisations, and I’d rather it reached fifty of them properly than five thousand of them incidentally. So it’s not on Amazon. It’s printed, and I post it to people who are working on this seriously.

THE BOOK
Is this book for you?
- Your programmes get excellent feedback and produce no visible change
- You keep buying new frameworks and getting the same result
- Your managers are not involved in development and nobody has worked out how to change that
- You cannot connect your development investment to anything a CFO would accept as evidence
- AI is changing the work faster than your programs can keep up
Inside
What the book covers
Why leadership development is underperforming
The architecture of skill
The STAR system
Development by design
Answering the CFO’s question
Where the method meets resistance
Read the opening
Chapter one
“Help me understand something.”
“We have invested $2.3 million in leadership development over the past eighteen months. Where is the return?”
Rachel felt her stomach tighten. She had done everything right. Built a leadership development program that would make any Fortune 500 company jealous: world-class facilitators, experiential learning, executive coaching, a custom competency framework that had taken eight months to develop.
The feedback scores were exceptional. 4.7 out of 5. Participants called it transformational. The CEO had personally thanked her at the last town hall.
And now she was sitting in a quarterly business review, watching a man flip through her life’s work with the expression of someone reviewing a restaurant bill he suspected contained errors.
She was not the problem. The programs were not even the problem. The problem was deeper, structural, meta. It was the way we had all been taught to think about developing human capability in organisations.
Every L&D professional knows about the forgetting curve. We cite it in our presentations. Then we design two-day programmes with no reinforcement and hope for the best.
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my first book
The Transformational Leadership Compass
My first book, and the one that started the thinking behind Leading with Skill. It’s a practical, jargon-free guide for leaders taking an organisation through change, and how to bring people’s heads and hearts with them.
Written from fifteen years of work across industries as different as IT consultancies, yoghurt factories and a flying trapeze school.
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