I help bold businesses grow faster and smarter. 25+ yrs advising companies adding $700m (ex Bacardi, The Guardian, News Corp, M&S, and BUPA)
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Joined March 2008
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Nearly 90% of CEOs think their staff trust them. BCG asked the staff and 46% do. On AI, 4 in 10 say the boss hasn't been straight about what it means for their job, yet only 15% of CEOs worry about trust. That gap is where AI programmes quietly stall.
My Claude Duet access came through on 29 October and I'm a bit giddy. An agent watching my inbox and diary and getting ahead of me. My only worry is the bill, as it all comes out of my Claude allowance. Anyone else got access? What did you throw at it first?
Uber is paying $2.3bn for ezCater, 53% above its 2021 valuation. Bending Spoons is getting Miro for about 8% of its 2022 one. Neither had raised money in four-plus years, but ezCater kept growing the whole time. news.crunchbase.com/ma/acqui…
Sainsbury's has 3,500+ in-store ad screens heading to about 5,000, and its Nectar360 ad arm is on track for a £100m profit target. Read its Morrisons walk-away through that lens. brkthruleadership.substack.c…
Tesco has lost its last appeal on method, so the equal pay claim from 16,000+ shop workers goes to trial. Next showed in September that a documented market reason can still win. The safest employers can explain every pay gap on paper. cityam.com/top-court-rejects…
a16z has dropped 'crypto' from its crypto fund, five months after calling its new $2.2bn fund '100% dedicated to crypto entrepreneurs'. Dixon is right that blockchain is now plumbing. The casino gave crypto its bad name. The smart contracts underneath are the interesting bit.
Shaw said all progress depends on the unreasonable man. Plenty of bosses took that as a licence to be horrible. The harder job is setting a target that looks slightly mad and still looking after the people chasing it. My Forbes piece on how: forbes.com/councils/forbesbu…
Flapping Airplanes raised $1bn on 21 Oct to get more out of every AI chip, and Nvidia is an investor. AI's real limit is power, buildings and cooling, so efficiency speeds growth up. More efficient steam engines raised Britain's coal use too.
Rolls-Royce is close to £100m-£200m of UK subsidy for its UltraFan 30 short-haul engine. Against a ~£3bn programme, and up to £9bn going back to shareholders, the money is modest. What it buys is credibility with Airbus and Boeing. The first backer sets the tone for the rest.
Sainsbury's walked away from Morrisons in February and agreed to sell Argos for £120m, after paying £1.4bn. Odd choices for a business chasing Tesco, until you go back to 2018. Full piece on BrkThru Leadership, Wednesday 28 October. brkthruleadership.substack.c…
Smith & Nephew and J&J's orthopaedics arm agreed the price, the structure and the share split. Then the talks died over who would be CEO, per the FT. Leave the leadership question till last in a deal and you learn the answer at the worst possible moment.
When everyone could build a dashboard, plenty of businesses ended up with five of them giving five different answers to the same question.
Staff-built AI apps can do far more than a dashboard. What leaders should agree before anyone builds one:
brkthruleadership.substack.c…
Skydance, the new Paramount and Warner Bros, thinks better tech will see off TikTok and YouTube. The harder problem is timing. YouTube has paid creators over $100bn in four years, mostly after their videos earn, while studios pay the stars before a frame is shot.
UK-listed firms issued 65 profit warnings in Q3 2026, the most since late 2024. A record 54% blamed policy change and geopolitical uncertainty, top cause six quarters running. That is VUCA: volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous. Boards should be seeing a range, with triggers.
Microsoft will run Copilot on its own Maia chips from 2027. They're built for inference, the bit of AI that costs money every time someone uses it. The firm many businesses rent AI from won't leave its own running costs to a supplier. Neither should you. thenextweb.com/news/microsof…
ASML, the only maker of the machines that print the most advanced chips, says its supply as planned won't fully meet demand in 2027 or 2028. A cheque won't fix it: the optics come from one Zeiss operation at two German sites. Expect AI compute rationed by price.
Amodei, Altman and Musk have all backed slowing AI down. On 12 October Zuckerberg said Meta has caught up, will spend more and won't slow down. Catching up cost a fortune, though, and Meta's real edge is the billions of people already in its apps.
substack.com/note/c-35975808…
Britain's AI minister on 12 October: if you can't control the risks, don't release the system. The UK will now look at how serious AI incidents and near misses get reported. The harder test is for every business using AI: could you say what your AI agent did last Tuesday?
The maker of CONTOUR fingerstick glucose meters has led a $36m round in Sava, a London start-up trying to end fingersticks, and will sell its sensor in Europe. Sava gets cash and a route to market in one deal. The catch: any future buyer has to deal with the distributor.
Nvidia sells the chips open-weight AI models run on, so every free download is future demand for its hardware. Now it's in early talks to buy Reflection AI, per the FT.
Free always has a sponsor.
brkthruleadership.substack.c…