Month: September 2025

Can a career manager make it as an entrepreneur?

Yes, if they get one thing right: openness.

I’ve always worked in startups – in that space where we try and identify opportunities, build systems and try to create value for clients.

In that time I’ve worked with lots of managers in large organisations. We’ve even hired some of them.

Most found the startup pace hard.

It’s the lack of support that gets you – having to do everything from creating a complex spreadsheet to fixing the printer yourself.

But that’s just the foundation. The boring but necessary stuff.

The real difference is whether they’re open or closed.

I must confess – I’m naturally quite closed.

As an engineer I’m heads down, focused on work, building things.

Fortunately, I work with partners that are the opposite of me and I’ve learned over time that being open is an essential skill to develop.

Open people are heads up. They connect with others, build relationships and look out for opportunities. They’re optimistic and politically astute. They’re likeable.

Drucker said that the purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.

Being open is how you do that.

In consulting, we add services only when it’s clear that clients need work done and every other option is worse.

Sometimes it feels like mucking out stables.

The work never ends, and just when you’re done it’s time to start again.

Take working with utility data, for example.

When I started out suppliers would email you billing files every month. Then portals came along and turned a one minute task into an hour of watching spinning loading screens.

And without the data, you’ve got nothing.

So we hired people, trained them as analysts and got them collecting and checking these bills.

We thought many times about outsourcing the task – but it takes a certain kind of person to care enough about getting this right – the detail, precision and technical complexity puts off most of the population.

And getting data and making sure it’s clean is the first step to doing everything else we do.

So we kept doing it in house. Because clients needed us to. And we had learned how to do it well.

This is the challenge clients have with outsourcing work- especially work that has to be done but isn’t strategically core to your business – like energy and carbon data management.

Jim Collins said it best – “If you can’t put your best people on it, then find someone else and get them to put their best people on it”.

Two years ago I started building AI tools to help me with tasks. Now, I’m leaning back into doing some of them myself.

Things that are too easy to do have no value. One of the few things I remember from the one economics module I took was that the price you ask will drop to your cost of production in a competitive market.

Work that AI does for you for pennies is only worth pennies to your buyer. You may imagine that your prospects will value the time and effort that went into crafting your prompts but really they’re thinking two other things.

1. Can I do this myself for free?
2. Can someone else do this for less?

The downward pressure is inexorable.

Let’s take one particular example – using AI to summarise documents.

A couple of years back I built a simple tool. It took pdfs, converted them to text, split them into segments that would fit in ChatGPT’s context window, and then automatically extracted the key points that mattered.

Not as summary – a distillation. The job was to remove the fluff and leave the facts and key strategic points.

The advantage – it was quick. The disadvantage – it did something that wasn’t really worth doing.

A document worth reading will already be structured in a way that does this for you.

An introduction or executive summary will lay out the key facts and points.

The rest of the text should only include information that is important and relevant.

The only reason not to read the whole document is if it’s badly written. The logical response is to ignore it, not use AI to summarise something that isn’t worth your time to read.

This is just one example – the lesson for me is do your own reading. And your own writing.

You’ll learn more that way.

I still use AI every day. It’s a powerful tool.

We just need to figure out what’s it does that’s really valuable.

How would you answer if someone asked what you were most proud of?

Burritos.

That’s was the answer that popped into my mind.

Admittedly, I was making burritos at the time.

Here’s the background. A year or so ago, I was making lunch packs for the kids.

White bread or a wrap. Ham. Cheese. Mayonnaise. A sliver of lettuce.

This was bothering me. For a few reasons.

The news was talking about the carcinogenic effects of processed meat. You had the embodied emissions in red meat. And the health problems of a diet high in animal protein.

Should I really be shovelling this stuff into my kids?

But they loved the stuff.

Then I thought about burritos. And the more I thought about them, they seemed the obvious solution.

Slow cook dry beans in batches. Red, black, pinto, chickpeas. You’re spoiled for choice. Add salt and spice. Nothing fancy. Rice as a base on a wrap. Beans on top. Chopped salad and tomatoes.

I tried it as an experiment. Sent the kids off with the new packs. They came back glowing. “That was the tastiest lunch ever.”

My morning now looks like this. Make porridge. Make burritos. 11 a week for the road warriors. Over 400 a year. Thousands as they go through school.

It’s the small things one remembers.

I’m a little confused about the jobs market at the moment.

I’m a little out of touch. But when I was starting my career it was the down bit of the dot-com bust.

I sent out hundreds of letters and got no response. It didn’t feel like there were jobs out there, at least not any that I could get.

But it seemed like it was a fair shot – if you kept trying you’d get something.

I’m not sure that’s the case now.

I keep hearing and seeing that people apply for a thousand jobs and hear nothing.

Okay – first, you can’t thoughtfully apply for that many jobs – it’s pretty much spam.

And on the other hand, recruitment managers must be overwhelmed by applications, and there’s got to be businesses set up just to maximise applications and play a numbers game.

So, the standard apply and be judged fairly system must be broken.

Which means the people getting the jobs, the opportunities, must be getting them through connections. Through knowing someone that can cut through the mess.

Technological solutions are making it easier for the haves to keep what they have rather than creating a level playing field.

Of course, this is a pessimistic zero sum view.

If technology destroys the existing job market something new will come up.

The people succeeding are the ones using unconventional ways to get ahead – building portfolio careers from the age of 16, leaning into new technology.

There are people creating new careers that didn’t exist a year ago. New business models that are being floated and tested.

What would you tell your kids now? Do you think the university -> job -> pension route is now done for?

This guy sat down next to me. “Are you writing a song?”, he said.

I was on the station platform waiting for the 16.53 to Leeds and making some notes. On a yellow legal pad with a fountain pen – with purple ink.

We talked for a bit. He’s in town doing some construction work. Writes songs. Likes the Beatles. Emigrating to Australia next week.

It was a short chat. He hopped on a train. I took the next one.

The afternoon had turned out glorious. The sun was out. The landscape flashed by. Grey clouds dotted a blue sky like an armada arriving off the coast of Normandy.

I noticed solar panels sprouting on warehouses. Elegant, flat panels covering south facing roofs.

Not the smoothest train ride and hard to write on. Another passenger remarked that he’d never been on a plane. More accidents now. His neighbour didn’t like trains going through tunnels.

Horses, each with a field to itself. One field with a row of VW Type 1 Beetles. Maybe being restored by the people in the grand new build next door.

You see and hear a lot more of life when you step away from the computer.

The US economy is sputtering. This should worry all of us.

There are two big happenings that are affecting markets, one immediate and one longer term.

The immediate issue is that the US economy is reeling from a firehose of policy shocks, what some might call erratic decision making, and what looks increasingly like a puncturing technology hype bubble.

People are being affected. The economy is adding fewer jobs than needed for economic growth.

Cooling demand usually has a follow on effect on energy markets, dampening global prices.

The longer-term issue is the rise of the far right, and the resulting economic consequences of power-based politics.

The Economist suggests that by 2027 some of Europe’s most significant economies could have hard right parties in office.

Traditionally such parties implement protective and nationalistic policies – offering tax cuts, competitive protection and handouts.

The result is often stagnation. Populism and poor economic decision making go hand in hand leading inevitably to fiscal crisis.

We can see the early warning signals here in rising bond yields – it shows that markets are starting to price in these risks.

And often, things get worse before they get better.

The word strategy reminds me of another one that is hard to define but you know it when you see it.

So what kind of strategy does a company pursue in these uncertain times?

A time where the gap between opposing views has never seemed wider.

On a recent UN Global Compact webinar Susanne Stormer from PwC said something that stuck with me.

As a company, you should ask yourself two questions:

1. Where are you positioned on the climate transition?
2. How do you treat your people?

In a decade of talking to managers only one, maybe at a stretch two, have said that sustainability is not an issue for them.

Of these, one was privately owned and did not have to answer to shareholders, and the owner didn’t really believe this climate change thing.

And the other was buried so deeply in the supply chain that no one asked them.

In other words, you can only ignore sustainability if you are invisible.

But if you’re in the game, and the other players are looking at you, then strategy is about position and the next move.

I mean – imagine you’re building a business now.

Why would you build one that’s not sustainable, or that treats its people badly?

Does that sound like a winning strategy?

When I hit a bad shot I always look at the bat like there’s something wrong with it.

The middle is too hard. The edges are too soft. There’s no grip.

It’s easier to do that than admit I need to work on my game.

It’s easier to look for a shortcut, a tip, a life-changing programme.

Something that will get me from here to there without having to go through all the tedious bit in the middle.

But the middle is the bit that’s worth doing.

That’s where the learning, the fun, the value is.

The hard thing is saying no to the easy pill.

And then focusing on the next step.

Getting in shape for the game.

Some services are time thieves.

I really resonated with a post from Paul Brown.

He said your clients aren’t short of reports and alerts – they’re short of minutes.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/paulbrown579_you-dont-sell-digital-health-to-clinicians-activity-7366684711647191040-ERwD

He was talking about clinicians.

But this applies to operators and managers across the piece.

Companies like Apple have convinced us that what we need to solve problems is to first reach for a new software product.

“There’s an app for that”. Apple’s trademark.

It’s easy to say yes.

It’s harder to ask why?

Why do we need this step? Why do we think this application will save us time? Why are we still doing all the work after spending all this money?

Too many applications just make it easy to do easy things.

They leave you with the hard jobs.

So now you have two jobs – the job you had, and the job of feeding the application you thought was going to make your job easier.

When we design services, we keep one key question in mind.

How will this thing we do return time to our client?