About

I’ve been a journalist for 50 years, and the job has never changed. You find out what’s true, you say it clearly and you don’t defer to anyone who’d rather you didn’t.

I started on local newspapers and moved to Fleet Street, writing and subbing for the Daily Mail and a long list of national, regional and trade titles. Broadcast came next. I anchored and reported for ITN World News for PBS, NBC and SABC, with work for Sky News, ITV and Channel 4 along the way. Radio followed, including 5 years hosting Alchemy 1.01 on UK Health Radio and co-hosting Hurt Less, Live More with the late Dr Mark Goulston.

Alongside the journalism I’ve spent decades teaching people to communicate. I trained spokespeople and executives with Electric Airwaves and Templar Advisors, working with Citibank, Deutsche Bank and London Business School, spent 10 years on the Council of Europe’s Democratic Leadership Programme in Strasbourg and Budapest, and ran media seminars for NGOs including the Open Society Foundation, the Westminster Foundation, the National Democratic Institute and the European Commission.

Somewhere along the way I trained in the other direction, in NLP, behavioural profiling and communication psychology. The deeper I went, the more I noticed how much of the personal development world asks people to hand their judgement over to someone else. That observation became a stance. The stance became a practice, and it’s now becoming a book, Say Goodbye to Gods and Gurus, about what happens when we stop deferring to higher authority.

Today my work runs on two tracks that turn out to be one. As an AI content and editorial consultant I help organisations keep their judgement, and their voice, while the machines do the typing. As a practitioner I help individuals do the same thing without the machines. I’m also co-founder of Ladder of Growth, a measurement framework for human development, and I co-host its companion podcast, Is It Bloody Working?, with my co-founder Alexia Leachman. The podcast title is the editorial standard applied to an entire industry.

I write Reflections from a Glitter Ball on Substack, I’m a contributing author to Voices of the 21st Century, New Makers of Modern Culture and The New Millennium Tales, and I serve as Vice President of St Andrews Business Club. I live and work in Pittenweem, on the Fife coast.

If you’d like to talk about any of it, get in touch.