Nobody sells a company. They sell the apparatus that made them necessary. That is the sentence owners resist hardest, usually some months after the closing, somewhere between the third unnecessary acquisition call and the second advisory role they have already stopped...

Authority does not come off at the front door. That is the part almost nobody plans for. Executives prepare for the scrutiny, the board, the succession politics, the loneliness of the seat. They do not prepare for the fact that the role travels home in the body — that...

The cruellest thing I see in organisations is not a dismissal. It is a dismissal that takes three years. Somewhere in most established companies there is a senior person everybody has quietly stopped relying on. He was there at the beginning. He carried the firm...