All Blog Posts

Why Good Advice Gets Ignored — And What To Do About It

Every B2B leader has seen it. A business hires smart, experienced advisers. The brief is agreed. The work is done. The presentation is strong. The room responds well. And then… very little happens. The advice is delayed, diluted, reworked, softened, buried in stakeholder politics, or quietly shelved. Not because it was wrong. Not because it lacked intelligence. But because good advice does not succeed on quality alone. That is why the Advice Value Chain matters. The...

The Talent Ledger: Why Workforce Strategy Is Now a Board-Level Issue

On reflection: looking at things differently. For many organisations, workforce is now the largest investment on the balance sheet — and often the least rigorously governed. Most leadership teams can tell you what they spend on travel, technology or procurement. Far fewer can explain the true cost of work across employees, contractors, outsourced services, management time, skills gaps, rework, vacancy drift and AI-enabled change. Fewer still can link that spend clearly to the outcomes...

The Three Critical Forces Reshaping Your Talent Strategy

Peter Lyall: The first in a four-part series on the forces reshaping work — and the operating models built to survive them. People have become the biggest investment line in most organisations — with their costs often the least rigorously managed. Leaders are debating where work happens, how many days count as “hybrid”, and whether flexibility is a perk or a policy. That debate makes for good theatre. But it’s not the real issue. The real issue is that the employment deal has been repriced...

The C-Suite’s People Problem Isn’t “Soft” – It’s Financial Negligence

Peter Lyall: Most executive teams treat workforce decisions like weather: complain about the conditions, issue a few policies, then act surprised when the forecast doesn’t improve. Meanwhile, “people” has quietly become the biggest investment line in the enterprise — and often the least rigorously governed. Not because leaders don’t care, but because many still manage workforce the way they did when “the workforce” meant employees on payroll, work was stable, and capability cycles moved at...

HR & Talent: From Activity to Outcomes (Time for a new HR Operating System)

Malcolm O’Neal, Chief Human Resource Officer: People have become the biggest investment line in most organisations — and the least rigorously managed. HR sits at the center of that contradiction. The function built to steward talent is still running on a program-centric, employee-only architecture, while the workforce it’s meant to manage has expanded into a sprawling ecosystem of employees, contractors, consultants, gig workers, interim specialists, shared services hubs, BPO teams,...

Internal Comms has a new job: Make the organization behave differently

The following is the second piece in a four part series looking at the interactions between talent strategy and internal communication. The first piece can be found here. For years, internal communication has been treated like the in-house newsroom: executives decide, comms writes, employees receive. That model didn’t work brilliantly even when careers were linear, the office was the center of gravity, and culture could be managed with a decent slide deck and a quarterly town hall. Now it’s...