/Insights

By Chris Carlisle Most leadership teams can easily tell you what they spend on people, technology, and suppliers. What is much harder to calculate is how much of that investment is lost in the gap between strategic ambition and daily execution. Individually, routine hand-offs, duplicated tasks, and management layers don't look like a crisis. But across an enterprise, they add up to a substantial drain on capacity and margin, leaving you paying for a team setup that isn't bui

We worked with an organisation that needed to find £500k of EBITDA from its back-office operation. On paper, the numbers immediately pointed towards headcount. There were 45 people working across nine sub-functions, with 15 managers. It would have been very easy to look at that structure; decide it was too big and start cutting. But spending time with the teams told us a different story. There were good, capable people working hard across the business. The problem was that th

By Gary Gamp Your workforce is ageing out faster than the next generation is coming in. The maths is already fixed, the shortfall is already booked, and the young talent arriving is arriving underprepared. Early careers has quietly stopped being a corporate social responsibility line and become a supply chain risk. Most leadership teams I sit with have a plan for everything except the thing that will actually constrain them. They can model demand three years out. They can nam

Think about how much has changed in businesses over the last five years. New markets have opened up, acquisitions have been made, products and services have evolved, technology has moved forward, and customer expectations have continued to rise. More recently, AI has created another wave of opportunity, while the pressure to improve productivity and manage cost has rarely been far from the leadership agenda. Through all of that, organisations adapt. New teams are created to r

Every struggling organisation has one thing in common: sooner or later, the senior leadership team becomes involved in everything. Every escalation lands on their desk. Every difficult customer ends up in their diary. Every operational issue demands their attention. It often feels like good leadership because everyone can see they're busy. In reality, it's usually a sign that the operating model isn't working as well as it should. One of the biggest misconceptions about leade

New workplace-readiness certification designed to equip learners with the skills employers consistently look for. Global certification body APMG International and learning consultancy smart/tasking today announced the launch of Career Ready Academy, a new certification programme designed to help individuals develop the practical workplace skills needed to succeed in an increasingly competitive job market. Recent research from the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) f

By Gary Gamp Enterprise transformation frequently suffers from a metrics problem. Progress is too often measured by the volume of tasks completed rather than the actual commercial value delivered. This creates an environment where project trackers look entirely healthy, yet the business transformation itself remains stalled. This challenge forms the basis of the second installment in our 10-part series on enterprise performance, where we isolate the recurring execution patte

These days, any business leader can use ChatGPT to generate a slick strategy document in minutes. It will feature sharp market analysis, industry language, and a convincing growth story that stands up to peer critique. The problem I’ve seen, however, is that investment committees frequently mistake a strategy deck for a guaranteed outcome. A slide deck is just a document. It is a feeling. It is not a target operating model, and it does not guarantee growth. Value is rarely l