Most founders hear investor concerns about their team and freeze. Here’s why that’s the wrong response — and what to do instead.

Our new LEADINGThought series has been tracking AI adoption and its impact on the human workforce. Early research on the pace of AI adoption and its impacts is unsurprisingly mixed, and occasionally contradictory. But the impact on junior employment has been highlighted consistently.

One of this year’s significant trade-offs is that between balancing rapid AI adoption with governance, trust, and integration.

For those of us who have spent most of our professional life leading transformation programmes and sifting through pages of project plans and Gannt charts, the idea of perpetual transformation sounds exhausting from the get-go.

It felt appropriate that our festive issue of our LEADINGThought newsletter looks back on the premise we started from: that maximising human potential benefits business, the economy, and society.

How can HR help SMEs create competitive advantage through people?

Reimagining the world of work during a period of significant disruption is a topic we have explored in several of our recent LEADINGThought issues.

How do we make progress in shaping the Human-AI workplace?

In one of our recent polls 73% of respondents voted for ‘reimagining work design’ as a key priority.

The disruption to skills by 2030, primarily because of the rise of generative AI has been well-documented. Reskilling and upskilling have been identified by leaders as a top workforce strategy over the next 12-18 months [1],[9].

“There is rarely a global audience for anything”, said Ted Sarandos, co-CEO of Netflix.

Personalisation matters now more than ever…

In a recent podcast, Patricia Frost , Chief People and Places Officer at Seagate technology, shared her philosophy of “winning with the team you have”.

The importance of attracting the best and brightest to build a solid foundation for the future to give organisations a competitive edge, was brought into sharp focus by recent reports of a significant drop in graduate vacancies.

The publication of the Diversity Project's Cognitive Diversity research report [3] for the investment and savings sector…

Intelligence on Tap’ is how Microsoft’s 2025 Work Trend Index report characterises the new ‘reality’ we are entering.

I was at once both unsettled and intrigued when one of the panel speakers at a recent event on midlife women entrepreneurs asked, ‘what are women for?’.

A quick scan of recent press headlines reveals the lack of consensus and even scepticism surrounding the HR profession; How to Save HR from Itself; The Human Resources reckoning; Why HR needs to go back to basics; Why we all need to cut HR some slack.

A person’s age shouldn’t define who they are. But, how many times have you heard people say, ‘you are too young… wait a few more years’ or ‘we don’t do things like that anymore… you are close to retirement… why do you care?’.

The promise of small businesses in boosting productivity and GDP has been consistently talked about by policymakers and governments.

Severance Season 3 was recently announced!

Under-representation is a word I became all too familiar with early on in my professional life.