Behaviour

I have come to treat one specific moment in any meeting as one of the more reliable diagnostic instruments available to anyone interested in how professionally mature the people in the room actually are, which is the moment at which somebody disagrees with somebody else on something of genuine substance, and the room then has to decide, collectively and in real time, whether the disagreement is going to be treated as a productive contribution to the thinking or as a small soc

Seven small drifts in the people who once asked the best questions in the room. There is a particular founder I have been watching for somewhere close to a decade now. We met when she was running a business of perhaps 18 people, slightly underfunded, charmingly insecure about her own credentials, and reliably one of the most curious people I had ever encountered in a meeting. She asked questions one had to think about carefully before answering, paused for considerably longer

On what founders quietly spend to look successful, and why nobody is calling it a tax. There is a category of business expense for which no accounting line exists, no quarterly report measures, and no tax authority has yet produced legislation, although one suspects they will eventually because the amounts involved are genuinely significant. The category does not appear on any chart of accounts in the form one might expect, because the spending is distributed across many di