I wake early, usually before six, and reach for a book before I reach for anything else. It might be economics, might be military history, might be something on artificial intelligence—there’s rarely just one thing on the go. I’ve read like this since I was a teenager, when I first came across Alfred Korzybski and got interested in how people actually reason, as opposed to how they think they reason. That habit never left. Amateur radio arrived at much the same age and probably started the taste for taking things apart to see how they work.
This morning I’m in St Albans, which is the quiet version of my week. No telephone yet, no meetings—just reading, and usually writing. I dislike the phrase “thought leadership.” What I’m actually trying to do is write something down clearly enough that someone else could pick it up, disagree with it, and test whether it survives. At the moment that’s mostly about the difference between a KPI and what I call a KPP—a Key Performance Predictor. A KPI tells a board what already happened. A KPP tries to catch a problem early enough that there’s still time to do something about it. It sounds like a small distinction. It usually isn’t.
On a full London day, I leave St Albans early enough to be at the club in Piccadilly by half past eight, usually on my second coffee. If I’m staying at the club, the day can begin earlier still. It is an extraordinarily efficient base: I can fit six meetings, three meals, a swim and a workout into a single day without once going outside, which I find almost impossible to improve on.
If I make a later commute into London from St Albans, the arithmetic changes. A mid-morning departure leaves room for perhaps three two-hour meetings—one followed by lunch, then two more during the afternoon—before the gym and either dinner or the journey home.
The meetings rarely have much in common with one another. One might be about a company that needs capital, another about a board appointment, and a third about an organisation whose real problem turns out to be nothing like the problem it thinks it has. My most recent meeting there was with an ambassador, and we spent almost the entire meeting in the swimming pool. They are all different, which is part of what I enjoy. The ones I find most interesting are those in which the presenting problem does not survive scrutiny.
Most of my working life has been spent walking into situations after the original plan has stopped describing reality, and the job is never to arrive with a better slide. It’s to work out, quickly, what’s actually happening while there’s still time to change it.
Some of that comes from thirteen years as President of Courts Martial. I’m not a lawyer, and running a tribunal is a different discipline entirely from running a company—but it leaves its mark. You learn to separate what’s known from what’s merely asserted, and that two honest witnesses can each be telling part of the truth. Somewhere along the way, somebody still has to decide. You can’t hand that off to the process.
The most extreme version of that was Iraq. I was serving at NATO Headquarters during the conflict, initially in strategic planning. On two occasions, at short notice, I accepted temporary command of the participating Iraqi generals and Regional Command Centres—up to 200,000 personnel drawn from the Iraqi security forces, police and intelligence agencies. One of those was Exercise SAQ’R, whose lessons fed directly into security planning for the 2009 elections.
What people rarely ask, and probably should, is what it is like to run an exercise of that scale alongside a real war that does not pause for it. Throughout both exercises, I had to keep exercise command distinct from real-world command, track planned movements, locations and tasking against what participating forces were actually doing in response to live events, and adapt the exercise immediately whenever reality displaced the script. You cannot allow the exercise to obscure the war—or its command arrangements to interfere with live operations.
There was, improbably, still room for teaching. Following a series of lectures on economic development and nation-building, I was formally appointed Professor of Economics & Management within Iraq’s National Defence University for the duration of my deployment. It remains one of the stranger lines on my CV.
Other days I’m in Wales, which is the corrective for all of that. A neighbouring farmer occasionally vanishes for a few days and leaves me the cattle, which I don’t mind—I grew up around livestock, so it isn’t as exotic as it sounds, and I’m usually paid in a bottle of Scotch. My dog Fforde, a rescue spaniel with more velocity than judgement, supervises. He replaced Tiny, who died earlier this year after years of being, by his own account, an excellent listener and a shameless opportunist around the passenger seat. Fforde has shown no interest whatsoever in PowerPoint. I’ve come to think that’s an advantage.
I have two adult children, and if I’m honest they matter more to me than any of the above, though corporate biographies rarely leave room to say so. I play chess badly and enjoy it anyway. I’ll go a long way for good theatre or ballet, which is one of the reasons I stay within reach of London. I own an Aston Martin, for reasons I don’t feel any need to defend. I have never once been persuaded by gardening, and I avoid it wherever operationally possible.
By evening, wherever I am, the boundary between working and not working tends to dissolve. Problems I haven’t solved carry on quietly in the background until two previously unconnected facts suddenly fit together—usually around midnight, which is inconvenient but reliable. Finance explains part of a situation. Operations explain another part. Law, culture, incentives and plain human behaviour explain the rest, and none of them explain all of it. That’s always been the interesting territory, for me—not owning one answer, but working out how the pieces actually connect.