I have spent twenty years running teams and the organisations around them: as a consultant at McKinsey and Accenture, in senior roles at Mastercard and Metlen, and in two firms of my own. Sagacraft is where I write down what that work has taught me, mostly about leadership and people, and about the work of running things.
If you are new, these are the essays I would hand you first.
- Some of your people must hate you. Why a manager everyone likes is probably not managing.
- The mortal sin. The case against dotted reporting lines, with no exceptions.
- The surprising road to better decisions. Share by default, withhold only when you must, and decide better for it.
- The People manifesto. What a workplace looks like when people come before structures and processes.
- The Planning Fallacy. Why deterministic plans fail in uncertain systems, and how to plan with humility.
- How to fix a Ferrari engine on the run. Rescuing a distressed project that cannot simply stop.
- Traditional consulting will die by PowerPoint. AI will not kill consulting; the slide deck is already doing it.
- More is different: my useless PhD just became relevant. Emergence, the idea at the heart of a physics doctorate, turns out to be the idea of the decade in AI.