Leadership & Management

Leadership & Management

Canada at 159

Andrew Penny, July 7 2026

Canada’s progress has been imperfect, uneven, and often slow — but slow steady progress compounded over 159 years becomes something wonderful. Canada’s quiet brilliance is not that it is perfect. It is that it has built a durable brand around trust, stability, resilience, humility, and usefulness. For a small country of just 41 million, and...

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Leadership & Management

The Agency Continuum

Graham Birkenhead, June 16 2026

Most companies say they want proactive people. People who spot problems before they become crises. People who take ownership, seek opportunities, and look for ways to improve things. And people who don’t simply wait to be told what to do before taking appropriate action. And yet, strangely, many of these same organisations unintentionally teach...

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Leadership & Management

What Are You Paying For?

Andrew Penny, June 9 2026

As a boy in Montréal, I delivered newspapers door-to-door (neither rain, nor snow, nor gloom of night, etc…)  It was seen as an essential service to keep the population informed and actively participating in our democracy. Getting real ’news’ is a bit harder now but no less essential – particularly for business leaders. To be effective, we need...

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Leadership & Management

Trapped by Success

Graham Birkenhead, June 2 2026

A few days ago, a hummingbird found its way into my garage and was flying around trying to get out.  The strange thing is that both garage doors were fully open, as was the side window, and there was plenty of daylight coming in. And yet the bird was 'trapped' in my garage.  For hours, it flew around in circles constantly tapping against the...

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Leadership & Management

What Gets Measured Gets Managed

Graham Birkenhead, May 19 2026

'What gets measured gets managed' is one of the most quoted phrases in management and leadership, and for good reason. Measurement matters, because organisations need visibility, leaders need feedback, and teams need clarity about what matters and whether progress is being made. Without some form of measurement, organisations tend to use a mix...

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Leadership & Management

The Hidden Cost of Small Irritations

Graham Birkenhead, April 22 2026

A surprisingly large proportion of what we do each day does not directly add value to the final product or outcome; estimations of the exact percentage varies depending on the type of work.  Some of this activity is actually necessary as it provides structure, control, and reliability and includes things like maintaining records, confirming...

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Leadership & Management

Why Smart Teams Get Stuck on Simple Problems

Andrew Penny, April 14 2026

I was in a strategy session recently with a management team trying to build a forecast. Good business. Smart people. Plenty of data. And completely stuck - not “this is tricky” stuck, but “we’ve been talking in circles for an hour” stuck. They were trying to answer a simple question: What does next year’s revenue look

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Leadership & Management

The Knowing - Doing Gap

Graham Birkenhead, April 7 2026

It is easy to assume that if people know what to do, they will do it. In most organisations, people are capable, experienced, and generally trying to do a good job. They understand processes, agree with goals, and can often describe what 'good' looks like. Yet the behaviour does not always follow: things drift, standards slip, and good...

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Leadership & Management

The Greatest Question of All Time

Andrew Penny, March 31 2026

We spend a lot of time looking for better answers. But every once in a while, you come across something more useful than a better answer. A better question. And in my experience, there’s one that stands above the rest - and we use this question in almost every client engagement: “What would need to be

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Leadership & Management

How We Name Things

Graham Birkenhead, March 24 2026

One of the things we humans do remarkably well is simplify the world around us. Reality is complex, nuanced, and constantly shifting. But in order to function day-to-day, we compress that complexity into something more manageable. One of the primary ways we do this is through

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