The man behind
the margin notes.

From red pen to boardroom.

My first trade was other people's sentences. I spent my early career as aneditorial consultant, marking up strategy papers and client letters for firms that could out-think almostany competitor and out-write almost none. The work was exacting and intimate: you cannot improve adocument without understanding the organisation that produced it — its politics, its fears, the meetingthe paper is really written for.

That work pulled me upstream. Fixing the sentence was rarely the fix; the sentence was a symptom. Behindevery muddled paper sat a muddled conversation, a position nobody had been willing to state, or a pieceof genuinely good thinking that had never been asked to defend itself. So I moved from correctingdocuments to rebuilding how leaders prepare them: the arguments first, the architecture second, the wordslast.

Today the practice runs on three legs. Advisory engagements with firms and leadership teams — seasonsof close work on the papers, meetings and messages through which their judgement travels. Keynotes andmasterclasses for conferences and offsites, built as arguments rather than topics. And writing: my ownessays, a monthly letter called The Witting Note, and ghostwritten positions for leaders whose voicedeserves better than committee prose.

I work across the United Kingdom and the rest of Europe, with law firms, accountancy practices,consultancies and the occasional institution that prefers to remain unnamed. The mix matters. Advisorykeeps me honest — every theory I put on a stage has first survived a live board paper. Speaking keeps mesharp — nothing exposes a loose argument faster than four hundred people hearing it once. And writingkeeps me patient: it is where the ideas get to finish their sentences.

What I believe

Three convictions run through everything above. First, that clarity is a form of respect: the readerwho is confused by you has been made to do your work. Second, that judgement is the true product ofprofessional services — and that firms which cannot show their reasoning are asking clients to buy onfaith. Third, that none of this is talent. Position, structure, staging: these are crafts, withapprenticeable rules, and adults learn them quicker than they expect.

A fourth conviction is newer, and I hold it with less comfort: that the professional voice is quietlydisappearing just as it matters most. Templates, decks assembled from decks, prose pasted throughsummarising machines — each of them useful, each of them teaching a generation of professionals thatlanguage is something assembled rather than composed. The organisations I admire most are swimmingdeliberately against this: they write in their own register, argue in their own shape, and are rewardedwith the scarcest commodity in the market, which is being recognisably, reliably themselves. I have nonostalgia for typewriters and no fear of software; I have a working life's evidence that the firms whichsound like nobody are trusted like nothing. The craft of sounding like somebody is learnable, teachableand — this decade's good news — rarer, therefore more valuable, every year.

How I am different

I am deliberately small. One practice, no associates, no licensee network — when you engage me, theperson in the room is the person you engaged. I am also deliberately narrow. I do not do marketingcampaigns, media training circuits or personal-brand makeovers; other people do those well, and breadthwould make me mediocre at the one thing I claim. What I claim is this: that after a season of workingtogether, your organisation argues better on paper, on stage and in the meetings where it counts — andthat the change survives the engagement, because it was built on structure rather than personality.

The method, in full

People sometimes ask what actually happens across a season of advisory work, and the honest answer isless mysterious than they fear. It begins with reading — not skimming, reading — every document thatcrossed the table in the last quarter: board papers, client letters, the pitch deck in its fourth andseventh incarnations, the all-staff email that misfired. Reading the record is the closest thing thistrade has to a lie detector. Organisations describe themselves in a certain register to the world and inquite another to themselves; the documents hold both, and the gap between them is usually where the workis.

Then come the conversations — not interviews, exactly, because the best material arrives after theinterview has formally ended, in the doorway, in the bit where someone says "well, the real problemis..." and glances at the wall before saying it anyway. I am listening for the positions nobody has beenwilling to state plainly: the trade-off everyone feels and nobody has been authorised to name, theargument that keeps losing because it keeps being made in the wrong room, in the wrong order, in thewrong voice.

The working sessions that follow are the part clients least expect and most remember. They are notworkshops in the conference sense — no flipcharts of post-it consensus, nobody building a tower out ofspaghetti. They are editing sessions in the old sense of the word: we take a live document that matters,and we argue it into shape. Why does this paragraph exist? What does the reader do differently after it?Where is the ask, and why is it on page nine? The questions are simple and the discipline is not,because the discipline is cultural: most organisations have spent decades rewarding the softening ofpositions, and a working session is where that habit gets interrupted, politely and in front ofwitnesses.

What changes first is rarely what clients predicted. They expect the prose to improve; instead themeetings change shape, because a paper that opens with its position gives the meeting nothing to do butengage with it. They expect pushback from below — "the partners will never circulate short papers" — andinstead find that partners, offered a two-page paper they can actually argue from, defend it liketerritory. The voice on the page and the voice in the room turn out to be the same voice, and once ithas a standard, it polices itself. That is the whole trick, if it is a trick: nothing sustained by mypresence, everything sustained by structure.

Where the ideas come from

Scrivener's error, some of it. I have kept notebooks since my first editorial job — not journals,exactly, but a running ledger of sentences that worked and sentences that failed, with post-mortems.The Witting Note is that ledger made public and civilised. Behind it sits a longer reading list than anysane person would admit to: the classical rhetoricians, who understood two thousand years ago that apersuasion is built from parts; the great report-writers of the last century, whose memoranda still movegovernments; and the working editors whose craft knowledge never made it into a book because they weretoo busy doing it. I have stolen from all of them, credited where credit was traceable, and testedeverything against the only laboratory that matters — the Tuesday meeting where a real decision getsmade by tired professionals reading real paper.

Beyond the desk

I read more than is strictly healthy — history, mostly, and the kind of old rhetoric manuals thattreat a well-built paragraph as a moral achievement. I walk long distances in bad weather, which iswhere most of The Witting Note gets drafted in my head. And I keep a stubborn, largely unsuccessfulkitchen garden that has taught me more about patience than any consultancy engagement ever has.

If you are wondering whether we would get on: the clients who return tend to share a few habits. Theywould rather be corrected than flattered. They read the margin notes before they read the invoice. Theysend documents before the decks are polished, because polish is the enemy of the diagnostic. And theytake a slightly unreasonable pleasure in the moment a muddled, committee-shaped paragraph finallybecomes one sentence that says exactly what it means — the small, private victory this entire practiceexists to manufacture. If any of that describes your room, the working-together page will tell you whatengaging me involves, and the letter is the easiest way to watch the method think in public before youdecide to put it to work.