I was talking recently to a founder and CEO about honesty. He has an open-door policy and means it. He wants people to challenge him, bring him bad news and tell him when they think he is wrong. But he also knows there is a flaw in the arrangement: he is still the CEO. The door may be open. The consequences on the other side of it are harder to judge. A CEO can say, with complete sincerity, “I want you to disagree with me.” The person sitting opposite still has to decide whet

Heal’s “Fourposter Sheet”. Sir Ambrose Heal helped build a distinctive visual identity around the four-poster bed, extending his ideas about design from furniture into typography, advertising and retail. A distant relative of mine spent much of his life designing beds. Sir Ambrose Heal joined his family’s furniture business in the late nineteenth century and became one of the figures associated with bringing modern design into British homes. His furniture was simpler than muc

Complexity has a way of disappearing in the retelling. A year of meetings, decisions, misunderstandings, good intentions and conflicting pressures can eventually become an adjective. Difficult. Slow. Political. Not strategic enough. Too strategic. Not commercial. Too ambitious. Not ambitious enough. This is partly practical. Nobody can attach a 14-page ethnography to every performance review. The trouble begins when the adjective starts to look like a permanent feature of the

We can spend three days trying to anticipate someone else's decision and three years accepting something we could change. Will they choose me? Will the work succeed? Will my children be happy? Will the future cooperate with the version of it I have prepared? We replay conversations, improve old answers and run scenarios that are unlikely to be required. It is an absorbing hobby, although not a useful one. At the same time, we can be oddly accepting of the parts of life that a