Opinion

The best managed team you’ll ever encounter has one distinctive quality: it functions brilliantly even when the manager is gone. That’s not luck — it’s the deliberate result of how the team was built. This final post covers the five conditions Google’s Project Aristotle found in every high-performing team — psychological safety, dependability, clarity, meaning, and impact — and exactly what building each one looks like in practice.

A penny doubled every day for 30 days is worth over £5 million. At day 15 it’s worth £163. That flat, underwhelming middle section is where most people quit — and it’s exactly where the work is. This post unpacks compounding beyond finance: how it operates in skills, reputation, and habits, the three traps that stop people benefiting from it, and why Warren Buffett’s fortune is less a product of genius than of duration.

Almost no bad manager thinks they are one. The truly awful ones are easy to spot — it’s the well-intentioned ones running a handful of subtle habits that do the real damage. This post names six of them: mistaking visibility for performance, solving instead of developing, avoiding hard conversations, micromanaging the capable, shifting priorities without acknowledgement, and confusing being liked with being trusted. Plus what good actually looks like instead.

Somewhere in your organisation right now, eight intelligent adults are sitting in a room watching a presentation they could have read in four minutes. This is called a meeting. It is considered normal. This post breaks down the five types of meeting dysfunction costing organisations billions, why managers keep calling them anyway, and four practical fixes that require no offsite, no software, and no culture change programme — just the willingness to hold meetings to a higher standard.

Stoicism starts clicking and suddenly you want to tell everyone about it. Don’t. The Stoics themselves would have found that embarrassing. This final post covers what to actually keep from the philosophy, what to quietly leave in ancient Greece, and how to apply it where it genuinely helps — your own reactions, not other people’s. A practical landing point for two thousand years of surprisingly useful thinking.

Knowing good ideas isn’t enough — the Stoics were clear about that. So they built practices. Concrete, repeatable daily exercises for the mind, as deliberate as any physical workout. This post covers five of them — the morning review, negative visualisation, the view from above, voluntary discomfort, and the evening review — each paired with what they actually look like on a regular Tuesday in 2026.

Stoicism has a reputation problem. It conjures images of stiff-upper-lip stoics refusing to feel anything — which is almost entirely wrong. The real philosophy is warmer, stranger, and far more practical than that. This post introduces the three thinkers behind it, the single idea that holds the whole thing together, and why the dichotomy of control hits harder in 2026 than it probably did in ancient Athens.

Awareness of cognitive bias is necessary. It is nowhere near sufficient. This final post in the Everyday Economics Series skips the vague advice and gets specific — five practical tools that build friction into your decisions before your brain’s shortcuts take over. The stranger test, pre-mortems, exit criteria, and more. Not a system for perfect choices. A system for slightly better ones, consistently.

You knew it was a bad film forty minutes in. You watched it anyway. That’s the sunk cost fallacy — the bias that makes past investment feel like a reason to keep going, even when every honest signal says stop. This post breaks down how it works, where it shows up in daily life, and the one question that cuts through the noise: given where things are now, does continuing make sense on its own terms?

Every decision has a hidden price tag — the value of what you gave up to make it. This is opportunity cost, and your brain is architecturally wired to ignore it. From free gifts that aren’t free to two-hour meetings with invisible price tags, this post breaks down why smart people consistently undervalue what they don’t choose, and the single question that fixes it.