I grew up in a working class town in the North West of England and started out as an apprentice Electrical Engineer. Overalls, early starts, learning the trade from people who didn’t suffer fools. It turned out to be the best leadership education I could have had. On a shop floor, respect is earned by what you can do, not by your title.
I spent the next thirty years working out how businesses really run, and how the people running them really think. Maintenance supervisor to Engineering Manager to Operations Director to MD, and finally CEO, across automotive, FMCG, packaging and precision engineering. I’ve been the apprentice covered in grease and the one accountable to the board, and I’ve never forgotten that the second job depends entirely on the people doing the first.
Along the way I learned TPM the proper way, inside a mature Japanese system, and later led three pillars of that discipline through to the JIPM Excellence Award, a standard very few businesses in the world hold. It taught me the thing that still shapes how I work: the improvements that last are the ones the team owns themselves.
Because that was the pattern everywhere. The technical problems are rarely the hard part. The hard part is people, whether they believe in the plan and whether they’ll tell you the truth. Get that right and the numbers follow.
That’s why I do this now. After a decade in the top seat, I stepped out to spend my time on the part I’m best at: helping other leaders get more from themselves and their people than they thought they could. I chair a Vistage group for CEOs and MDs, and through ZenithNow I coach, mentor, and work with manufacturers on the human and operational side of performance.
One belief runs under all of it: sustainable performance beats short-term heroics. You’d never run a machine the way most leaders run themselves, flat out with no maintenance, hoping it holds. I’m the same person on a shop floor as in a boardroom, and that’s usually where the useful conversations start.
A few principles I’ve earned the hard way, and won’t budge on.
Anyone can wring a good quarter out of a business by exhausting it. I’m interested in performance that’s still there in a year, and a team that’s stronger for it, not burnt out by it.
You’re surrounded by people with a reason not to be straight with you. I’m not one of them and neither are my Vistage groups. If I think you’re wrong, I’ll say so. That’s most of what you’re actually paying for.
If the improvement leaves when I do, it hasn’t worked. I build capability into you and your team so they own it, rather than depending on me to keep it alive.
I’m no different on a shop floor than in a boardroom, and I talk to a shift team the same way I talk to a CEO. Straight, human, no jargon.
I’ll tell you what I think, including when it’s not what you were hoping to hear. You’ve got enough people being careful around you. I’m not one of them.
Thirty years on the floor cured me of loving a framework for its own sake. If it doesn’t change what happens on Monday, I’m not interested, and neither should you be.
I’ve carried the pressure you’re carrying, and I know the bit nobody says out loud is usually the bit that matters. I make it safe to say it.
I’m here to help you get further than you would on your own, and to leave you stronger than you were, not more dependent on me.
No theory for the sake of it, and no pretending I’ve got answers I haven’t. Here’s what working with me is actually like.