You were dangerous once.
And a part of you still knows it.
Most leaders get domesticated by the organisations they lead. Wild Leadership is the work of becoming dangerous again. Not reckless. Grounded. Dangerous.
Three stories. Every figure names its source.
You are the generation running British companies.
Nobody tells you what the top is really like.
Losing your job is not the unusual part. Getting back in is.
Fifty years of British working life with the sources attached, a report on where a generation’s path went, and the accounts of people who got to the top and wrote down what the job was actually like.
You are being domesticated.
When you set out on your career you are most your original self. Your dangerous self. Because you haven’t been domesticated yet. But day by day this happens. The put-down in a meeting. Learning when not to speak your mind. The true sentence softened before it leaves your mouth, ten thousand times over. The name for it is Domestication, and what you have been doing is Editing: what you say, how you show up, who you are.
No one forced this. They rewarded it.
I have done this. I told myself I lacked the political capital to speak. It is Editing, and at the time I would have called it judgement.
Then one day, you make it to the top. The Apex. Nobody has told you it exists, or what staying there costs. You know the position is conditional. You may have nobody to say that to. Eventually everyone leaves. Whether they want to or not.
How domestication works, in full. What The Apex is, and what it costs to stay in it.
I have been where you are.
Three decades inside corporates and startups. I did not just watch domestication happen to other people. It happened to me.
Early on I sat silent in a meeting while a senior colleague tore into my team over things I knew were untrue. I lost the team that day, and I deserved to. It did not feel like surrender. It felt like being sensible.
I watched the same logic run through businesses I was responsible for, under investor and board pressure that did not let up. Good people went quiet. The whole place slowly organised itself around what was safe to say. I did not have a name for it then. I do now.
Wild Leadership exists because I needed it and it did not exist. Everything here came from that.
The longer version, including what that meeting actually cost.
“Clear, elegant writing about the need for leadership to be organic instead of mechanical.”
Take the path that is yours.
You do not have to talk to me to start. Two of these you do on your own. One is with me.
The Recognition
Privately. Seven questions on what your team tolerates, answered alone in ten minutes. I read every answer myself, and within the week I send back a personal read on what they suggest your team is organised around. No charge, and I do not add you to anything.
Take The Recognition
Field Notes
On your own. A Field Note on Monday. One scene from a working week, the kind you will recognise from your own, and what it is worth doing about it. Longer essays when something needs the length.
Read the work
Work with Magnus
With me. The consigliere works one-to-one with a chief executive on the decisions there is nobody else to talk to about. It starts with one conversation about what you are facing, and goes no further unless it should. For a team, The Clearing is one day.
Start with a clarity conversation
The work starts here.
The next sentence you are about to soften, leave it hard.