Work is crazy. Make it beautiful.
the operating system of the world's greatest teams
ABOUT
Writer. Speaker. Builder.
I study what good looks like in the world's greatest teams, decoding it, and applying it in partnership with people building an organisation, a team, or a career that outperforms, outlasts and matters.
That study started in 1997, inside corporates, start-ups and public institutions.
My new book, Stacked (Knowledge Resources, 2026), is the deepest decode yet. It follows how the most successful team of rugby's professional era builds an organisation, a team and a career that win. My first book, Character Insights for a Regenerative Future (Knowledge Resources, 2022), decoded the leader's own operating system, the five leadership superpowers. The two books work through a single question from different altitudes. Character Insights studied the person leading. Stacked works through the whole system, how a great team sets strategy, builds its people and grows the ones who come next.
In the foreword to Stacked, John Sanei kindly writes that I connect "strategy with humanity, performance with empathy, and leadership with purpose".
I speak to executive teams, conferences and leadership programmes on what the study has found.
Alongside the books and the speaking, I work hands-on with executive and leadership teams in my own Cape Town-based practice, mostly in financial services, retail and the development sector. Day to day, that means strategy offsites, team effectiveness coaching and change management. I'm also helping build AI Futuremakers, a game-based platform for non-technical people. Working with their line manager, they gain the confidence and skills to use AI in their own work and in their teams, so customer service, efficiency and how people feel about their jobs all improve.