Engineering management, people leadership and organisational capability
View All TagsOrganisations rarely struggle because they have too little data. They struggle because data is difficult to find, inconsistent in meaning, uneven in quality, poorly understood, hard to access, or used without sufficient control. The result is a familiar paradox: data volumes increase while confidence in data remains low.
Most organisations do not suffer from a lack of data. They suffer from a lack of confidence in it. This practical guide connects data governance, management and privacy with culture, democratisation, architecture, strategy, transformation, training and recruitment.
An AI solution engineer is often expected to understand models, data, APIs, cloud platforms and system architecture. Those skills matter, but they are not enough to make someone a trusted adviser.
Most “hard talks” fail because people argue inside the wrong conversation. Stone, Patton and Heen’s Difficult Conversations (third edition) shows that every tough exchange is actually three conversations at once: What Happened?, Feelings, and Identity. Shift from a battle stance to a learning stance, begin from the third story, and jointly map contribution—not blame. This guide walks the full book structure for practitioners in consulting, leadership and complex delivery.
Like it or not, you are a negotiator. You discuss fees with procurement, align sponsors on AI programme scope, settle vendor SLAs, and navigate internal priority fights that look like zero-sum battles but rarely are. Most people default to positional bargaining: take a stance, defend it, concede in small steps, split the difference. Fisher, Ury and Patton’s Getting to Yes—developed at the Harvard Negotiation Project and refined across decades of diplomacy, law, labour and business—offers a third path: principled negotiation. Decide issues on their merits, not through a contest of wills. Be soft on people, hard on the problem. Focus on interests, invent options, insist on objective criteria, and protect yourself with a real BATNA.
Most negotiation books teach what to say. Malhotra and Bazerman teach how the mind fails—and how to build a repeatable system that claims value, creates value, survives bias, and knows when to walk away. Negotiation Genius sits between Fisher and Ury’s principled method and Voss’s tactical empathy: analytic rigour plus behavioural science for deals that are complex, emotional, asymmetric, or outright ugly.
Careers and companies are not destroyed only by bad strategy—they are destroyed by fragile personal operating systems. Steven Bartlett’s The Diary of a CEO: The 33 Laws of Business & Life packages hard-won founder lessons into laws for self-mastery, storytelling, philosophy and teams. Treat them as a checkable OS, not as posters.
Unclear writing is usually unclear thinking. Barbara Minto’s The Minto Pyramid Principle gives the standard structure used across consulting: lead with the answer, group ideas MECE, order them logically, and pull the reader down a question-and-answer pyramid. Master it once; every memo, proposal and board pack gets sharper.
Classical deal-making often worships rational split-the-difference compromise. Chris Voss’s Never Split the Difference argues that high-stakes negotiation is emotional first—and that the side that makes the counterpart feel understood gains information, leverage and durable agreements. Hostage-negotiation tools become a business field manual: mirrors, labels, calibrated questions, accusation audits, Ackerman bargaining, and relentless Black Swan hunting.
The CEO job looks like a longer version of every prior leadership role. It is not. The altitude changes: you set direction for an entire enterprise, align thousands of people you will never meet, mobilise a team that must outgrow individual egos, help a board help you, connect stakeholders who do not share your incentives, and still protect the few hours only you can spend well. Extraordinary CEOs do not win by working harder at middle-management tasks. They win by adopting six mindsets—and practising them until the organisation feels the difference.