Twenty years of innovation at scale, then scaling innovation

Inside the machine

I spent over twenty years at Reed Elsevier (at the time, and still today as RELX, the most valuable publishing company in the world). I made it into the company's top 100, sitting on the global divisional board of its most important division, scientific publishing, the most profitable arm, and a very impressive talent pool too: PhDs who'd left academia, ex-McKinsey and BCG consultants, genuinely sharp people.

That whole career ran through one long transformation. Publishing was one of the first industries the internet properly disrupted, and from the nineties onward we had to rebuild almost everything: how content was sourced and reviewed, how it was sold and promoted, the digital operations behind all of it, and eventually the business model itself. It's the same kind of forced reinvention, technology rewriting a business from the ground up, that's now driving most of the ventures I coach today.

What I was known for in that building was ideas, and getting them funded, more than commercial or managerial polish. I built a track record of pitching big innovation bets and walking out with real budget behind them, sometimes a few million at a time, from executives who believed in the idea as much as I did.

Not from the sidelines

I've done this from inside the machine, not from outside it. Consultants, coaches, and investors mostly see innovation from the sidelines. Founders usually build it from a blank slate, without an existing organization's inertia to push against. I ran innovation projects inside a huge, established company, with real revenue to protect and real politics to survive, closer to what a leadership team runs into as their own company scales and starts accumulating that same weight.

Getting the funding was the easy part. Running the project was where things got real. Something always went wrong that nobody had planned for: a technical showstopper nobody saw coming, customers who said yes in a meeting and no with their budget, an impossible trade-off between keeping the core business running efficiently and actually building something new. None of my projects ended up looking like the plan we'd funded. I learned to stop expecting them to. The goal I'd set out to reach almost never showed up on schedule or in the shape I'd imagined, but something valuable almost always did.

I hired a lot of people into that uncertainty over the years: the ones crazy enough to throw themselves at an idea that didn't have the whole organization behind it yet, knowing it might not work. When a project didn't land, I had to let some of them go and find them somewhere else inside the company to land. I've been that person myself too, the one pushing an idea uphill against inertia and other people's politics. That's where the empathy comes from, and it's still what I'm most passionate about supporting: the people willing to take that risk.

I also came to respect the people I used to be impatient with: the ones running operations, running finance, holding the line on what already works. If it were only people like me chasing new things, nothing would actually get built. Good leadership needs both, and most of the friction I now coach around is the two sides not realizing they need each other.

From mentoring to coaching

I left twelve years ago, once I'd seen enough to know a publicly listed company will always have a ceiling on how fundamentally it can innovate. I started mentoring startup founders, ended up leading a couple of accelerator programs, and, as part of that, managing the mentor pool. The mentors founders rated most highly were the serial entrepreneurs: people who'd actually built something before. But I kept watching them do the same thing: project their own path onto someone else's business.

Founders would come to me and say, "Mentor A told me X, Mentor B told me the opposite. What do I do?" My answer was always some version of: that's your call to make, not theirs.

That's where I actually found coaching, not mentoring. Coaching means asking the right questions, saying as little as possible myself, and helping someone get to what they already knew but hadn't said out loud yet.

Training, and how I apply it

I trained in two disciplines that now shape how I work. Co-Active taught me that the real decision-making usually isn't happening in someone's head. It's in the body, the gut, before it ever gets to logic. I've seen a single session shift something years of thinking hadn't moved.

ORSC (Organization and Relationship Systems Coaching) took that further: a team, or a couple, has its own identity, its own "system," separate from any one person in it. Getting close to that system's perspective works the same way getting close to your own gut does. I'm naturally left-brained myself, and it took me a while to buy this, but I've never coached a team that didn't, eventually, see it too. I'm currently certifying for the International Coaching Federation's Advanced Certification in Team Coaching (ACTC) to go deeper into this specialty.

I've come to believe a scale-up's crises (the leadership crisis of the early days, the loss of alignment as it professionalizes, the second wave of friction once it scales again) are far more predictable than founders expect. I coach with that map in mind. It means I'm rarely surprised by what a leadership team is stuck on, and the fix is usually less about that team's particular flaws than about recognizing which stage they're actually in.