Topic · 30 pieces

leading and feedback

Leading is mostly talking: telling a team about a change, praising precisely, pushing back on a senior without a fight, and listening long enough that people tell you the truth. These pieces give you the shapes and the first sentences.

Setting direction, giving feedback, disagreeing upward and having the conversation you keep postponing.

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Leadership and presence

leading through change: how to tell your team what nobody wants to hear

A reorganisation, a lost client, a new policy, a payroll that will be late. Every leader eventually has to stand in front of people and say something that will disappoint them. The words you choose in the first two minutes decide whether the team trusts you through what comes next.

6 min read Case studiesCase study

the new manager's first month

A strong senior developer in Bengaluru, a promotion she had worked for, and a team of six who were her peers on Friday. One of them was her closest friend at work. What the coaching worked on in the first month, conversation by conversation.

6 min read Leadership and presence

feedback that lands: giving it well, and hearing it without shrinking

Most feedback advice is about telling a junior colleague what went wrong. Real working life is wider: praising someone so it means something, telling a senior that their plan has a gap, working with a colleague in another culture, and, hardest of all, sitting still while someone criticises you.

5 min read Life and relationships

listening so people feel heard: ten lines that show you were listening

You can listen carefully and still leave someone feeling unheard. The difference is usually not attention. It is what you say back. Here are ten lines for work, a partner, a teenager, a grieving friend and an upset customer, and why each one works.

5 min read Speaking at work

storytelling people repeat: turning an experience into a two-minute story

Facts inform. Stories are what people repeat at dinner. Yet most professionals say they have no stories, then describe a week full of them. Here is a simple five-part shape for turning ordinary work into a two-minute story, and how to cut, sharpen and practise it.

6 min read Leadership and presence

the conversation you keep postponing

Saying no to a senior. Telling a good colleague their work is slipping. Asking for the raise. Apologising to someone you hurt. Most of us know exactly which conversation we are avoiding. Here is a simple shape for having it, and the words to start.

6 min read Speaking at work

say the point first: the PREP and pyramid habits that make seniors listen

Most professionals tell the story in the order it happened. Seniors want it in the order they need it. Two simple structures close that gap.

6 min read Leadership and presence

executive presence without pretending: what it is and what it isn't

"You need more executive presence" is some of the most common and least useful feedback in corporate life. Here is what it usually means, what it does not, and what you can practise.

6 min read Landmark MomentsChicago, 26 September 1960

the night Kennedy and Nixon met the camera, and the myth that followed

In 1960, two men stood in a Chicago television studio for the first televised presidential debate in American history. One looked rested and spoke to the lens. The other looked unwell and spoke to the room. The story that grew out of that night is famous. Parts of it are true. One part probably is not.

5 min read Landmark MomentsSan Francisco, 9 January 2007

three products, one device: how Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone

In January 2007, Steve Jobs walked onto a stage in San Francisco and told the audience he was about to introduce three new products. He named them one by one. Then he revealed that they were all the same thing. Behind that simple moment sat an unfinished phone and a carefully planned route through it.

5 min read Landmark MomentsWashington, DC, 28 August 1963

the moment Martin Luther King Jr. set his text aside

At the Lincoln Memorial in August 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. was reading a speech finished only hours before. Partway through, he moved the pages aside and began to speak about a dream. It looks like a moment of pure inspiration. The record shows it was also the fruit of years of practice.

5 min read Landmark MomentsChicago area, September to November 1982

the Tylenol recall of 1982: what really happened, and what the legend leaves out

In the autumn of 1982, seven people in and around Chicago died after taking Extra-Strength Tylenol capsules that someone had laced with cyanide. Johnson & Johnson's response is taught in business schools as a model of how to handle a crisis. Much of that reputation is earned. Some of it is legend.

5 min read Landmark MomentsUtah, Alabama and Florida, 27 to 28 January 1986

the Challenger charts: when the warning was there but the message did not land

On the night before the space shuttle Challenger was launched, engineers who feared the cold argued against it on a long teleconference. They were overruled. Seven people died the next morning. The way their evidence was presented has been debated ever since, and the debate itself holds a lesson.

5 min read Landmark MomentsPortland, 28 December 1978, and Guam, 6 August 1997

the hint that was not enough: what cockpits learned about speaking up to a senior

Two air crashes, nineteen years apart, have something painful in common. In both, someone junior in the cockpit saw part of the danger and spoke, but softly. Aviation spent decades learning to fix that. What it learned is useful to anyone who has ever had to tell a boss something unwelcome.

6 min read Landmark MomentsPhoenix, Arizona, 9 October 2014

the same-day correction: Satya Nadella, a wrong answer and a culture of learning

Eight months into his job as Microsoft's chief executive, Satya Nadella gave a bad answer on a stage full of women in computing. By the evening he had told every employee he was wrong. The episode became part of the story he told about learning in public, with a lesson for anyone who has misspoken in public.

5 min read Landmark MomentsMadras and PepsiCo, from 2006

the gift of your child: Indra Nooyi's letters to her executives' parents

When Indra Nooyi became chief executive of PepsiCo, relatives who came to see her family in India congratulated her mother, not her. That small scene, as she tells it, led her to write to the parents of her senior executives. It is a story about a very old form of communication: the specific, handwritten kind of thanks.

5 min read Landmark MomentsKerala, August 2018

when the water rose: how Kerala communicated through the 2018 floods

In August 2018, Kerala had its worst floods in close to a century. Hundreds of people died and well over a million had to leave their homes. Alongside the soldiers, sailors and rescue teams, the response ran on words: official statements, volunteer websites, WhatsApp groups, fishermen calling to each other across flooded lanes, and a running fight against rumours.

6 min read The ExperimentsReal study, misquoted claim

is 93% of communication really non-verbal? what Mehrabian actually tested

You have probably seen the slide: words 7%, tone 38%, body language 55%. It is one of the most quoted numbers in communication training. The studies behind it are real. The way they are quoted is not. Here is what was actually tested in 1967, and what it means for how you speak.

5 min read The ExperimentsMixed evidence

the photocopier study: what the word because really does

A famous 1978 experiment at a university photocopier is often summed up as "just say because and people will comply". The real result was more interesting, and more useful. The empty reason worked only for a tiny favour. When the ask got bigger, people wanted an actual reason.

5 min read The ExperimentsReplicated, with limits

the tapping study: why your explanation sounds clearer to you than to anyone else

A graduate student at Stanford asked people to tap out well-known songs on a table while a partner tried to name them. The tappers were sure the tunes were obvious. They were not. The study became one of the most retold stories about expertise and explanation, and it is worth knowing what it did and did not show.

5 min read The ExperimentsReplicated, with limits

psychological safety and Google's Project Aristotle: what the research says about teams that speak up

A hospital study that seemed to show the best nursing units making the most mistakes. A factory study of 51 teams. A Google project on 180 of its own teams. Together they made "psychological safety" one of the most quoted ideas in management. The core idea is well supported. Some of what gets bundled with it is not.

5 min read The ExperimentsReplicated, with limits

the Pygmalion effect: what other people's expectations really do to performance

In the 1960s, a Harvard psychologist told teachers that certain children were about to blossom. The children had been picked at random. A year later, some of them had gained more on an IQ test than their classmates. The story is famous. The evidence behind it is weaker, and more interesting, than the legend.

5 min read The ExperimentsMixed evidence

do listeners trust accented speech less? what the accent and credibility studies really found

In 2010, two researchers in Chicago reported that listeners rated simple trivia statements as less likely to be true when they were read in a foreign accent. The finding spread fast. Since then, several careful attempts to repeat it have found no effect. Here is what the research says, and what it does not.

5 min read Thought StudiesEssay

if you could only say three sentences a day

Imagine waking up tomorrow with a strange allowance: three spoken sentences, no more, until you sleep. No typing to get round it. What would you cut first, and what would you protect? We have been asking our coaches this question for a while, and their answers say a lot about what talk is for.

5 min read Thought StudiesEssay

silence as a sentence

We coach people to speak. And yet some of the most important things our learners ever communicate are said with no words at all: the pause before a price, the question left hanging, the quiet that follows bad news. Silence is not the absence of a message. It is a sentence in its own right, and like any sentence, it can be clear or confusing.

5 min read Inside BrightsideInside Brightside

think on your feet: why we built a masterclass for the question you did not prepare for

Our coaching is one to one, and it always has been. In September 2026 we also opened a single live group room: a 90-minute masterclass called Think on Your Feet. This is why we built it, what happens inside it, and what we deliberately left out.

4 min read Inside BrightsideInside Brightside

SpeakX to UNLEARN: notes on an experiment we ran, renamed and retired

Most companies only talk about what they launch. We think a journal about honest communication should also show the things we tried, changed and stopped. Here is the short life of SpeakX, a two-hour live workshop, and what it became.

4 min read

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