Share Learnings

While investing in businesses, show up, do the work, contribute, be patient. tommccallum.com site traffic to January 2021, roughly doubling each year since I started writing in October 2017 Inspired by Seth Godin's practice of daily posting, I started the same...

If we could hold our plans more lightly it might enable us to be more compassionate with each other and ourselves, when events do not meet our expectations. Image from "Do Thoughts Even Matter", from the Three Principles Living site In my practice (always practice,...

Today, for the first time in a long while, am curating a post from Seth Godin, whose practice of daily posting dates back decades and who was an inspiration for me to start doing so over 1,200 posts ago. At this very difficult time for humanity, Seth's concise words...

British Army Mission Command: Don’t tell your people how to do their job, simply make clear what the Mission is and empower them to step up and achieve it. How could you speed up the process of Covid testing drivers to get them through a bottleneck and keep supply...

Take care of your people , I wrote yesterday, reflections from a call with a CEO who had focussed on that one thing since the pandemic had begun, a focus that has been key to their business entering 2021 thriving. In that discussion it felt clear that this was only...

Companies: Take care of your people. This week I had a catch up call with a past client, a CEO who I hadn't spoken to since early in the pandemic. They and their business have come through things well, largely due to foundations laid year before at multiple levels....

Sir Angus Grossart Inspired by Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger and an avid student of them as I am, I often use the phrase: one of the easiest ways to make money is to think longer term than the next guy With that I often refer to "patient capital" and am, my bias I...

So, how do you speak on Zoom without saying a word? Well, back in November I came across a great idea, cards to communicate when on group video calls. In that post I wrote: In the early days of email, we had no emoticons, but we did have text equivalents (hence the...

This image depicts how this lockdown feels to me. The other day I had to drive down a motorway on an essential errand. Yes, the signs tell you to stay at home, save lives, protect teh NHS. In addition, it is the darkest time of year, plus virtually every car on the...

A core "why" for my daily writing is to share learnings, so, yesterday I had an inspiring conversation with a business leader in the USA, who had come across a post I wrote called: "Enabling Constraint" and was intrigued by the idea embedded in the term. One thought I...

JFK was a visionary, so he set out a question that would focus and align the American people, the question being "how do we get to the Moon by 1969?" On May 25, 1961, JFK announced the goal of landing a man on the Moon by the end of the decade before a joint session...

Image by sketch2think from the thoughts of naval Are you creative or are you productive? The question is a trick one. Very little in life is a binary choice, an "either/or". Some may say: "the most creative people don't work to a schedule". Well, whilst I believe it...

Meeting interesting people doing interesting things When I moved to London with few friends or business contacts here, I simply decided to look to meet interesting people doing interesting things. Three and a half years later, I'm still doing that (and I love it!),...

What is the next one thing? My home page highlights what I focus on with my clients: "What's Next", typically supporting them on major change, meaningful impact. Today, though, as the week starts, I'm reminded of a client who recognises in themselves that, at the end...

The insight for me is that the internet is the most incredible serendipity generator. -doh! Why didn’t I see that way before! A bit like the time I agonised over the best way of cutting pancakes with lasers without creating a burnt hair smell - then talking to a...

Where could you benefit from a launch before you are ready? Yesterday we launched the new website. It isn't 100% ready, but I chose to launch. It is about 90-95% ready, all the main elements are there, so we chose to launch anyway, then we (the small team around this...

Time to tell people what you are focussed on now. I'm about to re-launch my website after several months of going back to "First Principles" (First Principles thinking will be the subject of a future blog) in order to patiently build a concise "less is more" site....

Seth's new book, available to pre-order on Amazon My work is to listen, then support. Clients will talk me through an opportunity or challenge, taking me through many angles and details before then asking me for my thoughts and insights. Quite often, my response...