Leadership Archives - Neil Martin - Beats, Business and Life

Painted night scene of five climbers roped together with a gold rope, walking in a line across moonlit snow under a starry sky towards a mountain ridge

Know Your People and Know Your Business: Sun Tzu Without the Enemy

A fresh take on Sun Tzu’s advice to know the enemy and know yourself, and a simple way to get AI to interview you so you understand your business and its people better.

Samuel Smiles on help that weakens and help that strengthens, a personal trainer who won’t lift for you, and a graduate who kept getting new challenges.

Stop Lifting the Weights for Them: Samuel Smiles on Help That Makes Your Team Stronger

Business

Why doing your team’s work for them keeps them weak, and the question that helps you hand a task back so they grow into it.

P. T. Barnum’s first rule for making money was to choose work that fits you. Three questions to test your own fit, and what to hand over when it doesn’t.

Work That Fits You: P. T. Barnum’s First Rule and Three Questions to Test It

Business

Three simple who questions to check whether the work you’re doing fits you, built on P. T. Barnum’s first rule for making money and a client who was scared of their own team.

What A Message to Garcia still teaches about reliability, why trust comes before liking, and how giving trust builds a team you can hand things to.

Be the One They Can Hand the Letter To: A Message to Garcia on Trust

Business

What A Message to Garcia still teaches about reliability, why I put trust before liking, and how giving trust builds a team you can hand things to.

Benjamin Franklin's questions for the morning and evening ask what good you'll do and what good you did. Why they're worth borrowing for your business week.

The Two Questions Benjamin Franklin Asked Every Day

Business

Benjamin Franklin started and ended each day with a question about doing good. Why they’re worth borrowing, and why the only person who needs to be proud of you is you.

Illustration of an old wooden workbench with a claw hammer resting on a scrap plank full of practice nails, most bent over and the newest driven in straight, under a warm work lamp

AI didn’t take the job. It took the bit that trained people for it.

Business

AI can do the junior work in seconds. The trouble is, the junior work is where people learned judgement in the first place.

Illustration of the view from behind an empty DJ booth, two turntables and a mixer in front, looking out over an empty dance floor lit by warm spotlights

Everything I know about leadership, I learned behind the decks

Beats

I was 15 the first time I emptied a dancefloor. What that taught me about reading the room is still the best leadership lesson I know.

Illustration of an empty hammock between two trees at golden hour, a closed laptop and a cup of tea on a side table, and the lit window of an empty garden office behind

The best leaders are lazy… prove me wrong

Business

If you’re the hardest working person in your business, you’ve built a trap. The best leaders often look lazy from the outside.

Illustration of an old round cream and brass thermostat on a hallway wall turned down low, a scarf on a coat hook beside it and a radiator glowing softly below

Why you might be sabotaging your own estate agency

Business

On Chris Watkin’s sofa in Grantham I talked about the bit of you that quietly undoes good work, and the 10 or 15 minutes a night that helps you catch it.