A board’s most important task is to ask regularly if it is itself fit for purpose. That requires, above all, a deep sense of self-awareness and metacognition, a skillset no boards seem to be seeking actively in their search for new directors.

The lack of experience holding board-keen people back is a real challenge. Advising inexperienced board-keen people to try and become charity board directors is not the answer. 

When evaluating job offers, think of the role, the degrees of freedom, the culture. But real wealth will come if you know how to deliver real, positive and sustainable impact with all of these.

Ask a candidate why you should not hire them, and you get a lot more insight into their characters than all the preceding questions have given you.

Classroom lectures in management schools can not equip managers to deal with the contact sport of managing and developing people. These learnings from my experience may resonate.

If you want to remove hiring bias, don't turn to AI; take a leaf from the British civil service's book and use first-principles thinking to fix the process.

Most hiring is happenstance; wrong hiring decisions are not irreversible; talent cannot thrive in unsuitable work conditions; one and done is no way to build an inclusive organisation: these are some of the lessons I have learnt through my career.

Don't just fire that "toxic" employee. Stop, reflect, examine the role your leadership and your organisation played in fostering that toxicity. Then fix it.

While business is already grappling with the need to deliver greater accountability towards the societal context they operate in, politics in liberal democracies is due an overhaul.

I pick social commentary, business books, quirky books on popularity, a business novel and poetry. Most are not on popular lists. Which is why this list is worth a read.