What I Know Now: The Book
Most board directors arrive in the role without a manual. Some pick it up quickly. Many spend years doing the job by feel and never quite sure whether they’re getting it right.
What I Know Now is the book Paul Rothwell wished someone had handed him 35 years ago.
Written from four decades at board level – as director, MD, CEO, chair, NED, and investor across manufacturing, food, retail, and engineering – it covers the eleven things that actually determine whether a board makes a business better or lets it drift: purpose, leadership, culture, performance, people, strategy, growth, exit, family-business dynamics, reputation, and what the role eventually teaches you about yourself.
Direct, experience-based, and deliberately short on theory, each chapter ends with a single question the reader has to answer for themselves.
This is not a governance textbook. It is a working guide for owners, MDs, directors, and aspiring directors who are already doing the job and want to do it better.
The chapters
Chapter One – Boards Should Make Things Better Purpose, and why boards fail
Chapter Two – Leadership Is Behaviour How you act, communicate, and set the tone
Chapter Three – Culture: What You Tolerate, You Get What culture means and what it costs when you ignore it
Chapter Four – What Good Looks Like High-performing boards in practice
Chapter Five – People Are The Work Managing people, politics, and hard calls
Chapter Six – Strategy Needs Energy Roadmaps, strategy sessions, and three not thirty
Chapter Seven – Growing Beyond Yourself Scaling leadership at every stage of your career
Chapter Eight – The Exit You Haven’t Planned For M&A, exits, earn-outs, and the distraction nobody warns you about
Chapter Nine – Family Businesses Good intentions. The conversations that don’t happen.
Chapter Ten – Reputation What people say when you’re not in the room.
All proceeds from the book are donated to Northern Ireland Children’s Hospice.
A closer look
Chapter One – Boards Should Make Things Better Purpose, and why boards fail. Most boards are well-intentioned. Few are genuinely useful. The difference is not governance knowledge – it’s whether the board actually makes decisions and acts on them. This chapter is about the gap between correct and effective, and why closing it matters more than most directors realise.
Chapter Two – Leadership Is Behaviour How you act, communicate, and set the tone. Your team watches everything you do and draws conclusions from all of it. This chapter covers the most common failure in leadership – the gap between what you intend and what people experience – and why when something goes wrong, the first place to look is yourself.
Chapter Three – Culture: What You Tolerate, You Get What culture means and what it costs when you ignore it. Culture isn’t the values on the wall. It’s what happens when something goes wrong – whether people tell the truth early or hide it late, whether standards apply to high performers too, whether speaking up is safe. This chapter is about what builds it, what destroys it, and the toxic individual problem most leaders avoid for too long.
Chapter Four – What Good Looks Like High-performing boards in practice. Good boards feel different. Decisions get made, actions get done, and people leave with more energy than they arrived with. This chapter sets out what makes that happen in practice – including a scoring tool you can use with your board once a year.
Chapter Five – People Are The Work Managing people, politics, and hard calls. The right instinct is always to develop first. But some people are in the wrong role, and keeping them there helps nobody. This chapter covers the calls most leaders delay too long – including the founder’s early team, the subtle sabotage nobody names, and the conversation you know you need to have but keep finding reasons to avoid.
Chapter Six – Strategy Needs Energy Roadmaps, strategy sessions, and three not thirty. Strategy needs an open mind and full energy – not whatever is left in the tank after two hours of monthly reports. This chapter covers what makes strategy sessions work, why implementation fails so often, and the simple discipline that changed everything: three things get done, thirty don’t.
Chapter Seven – Growing Beyond Yourself Scaling leadership at every stage of your career. At some point every leader has to grow or the business stalls. Most plan their finances obsessively and their leadership barely at all. This chapter is about the moment the hairline cracks become fault lines – and what to do before they become dangerous, rather than after.
Chapter Eight – The Exit You Haven’t Planned For M&A, exits, earn-outs, and the distraction nobody warns you about. The real challenge in any deal isn’t valuation or legal complexity. It’s the workload, the isolation, and the distraction – and what happens to the business while all of that is consuming you. This chapter covers what the advisors don’t see, so don’t warn you about – the earn-out trap, why succession planning is almost always started too late, and the post-deal integration problem that rarely gets planned for properly: the vacuum that fills with rumour, the overlapping roles that haven’t been resolved, and why the acquiring side’s workload is the enemy of the clarity the acquired side desperately needs.
Chapter Nine – Family Businesses Good intentions. The conversations that don’t happen. Family businesses have all the same issues as any other SME, but the emotional stakes are higher because the relationships are permanent. The families that work best have the conversations that are hardest to start. The ones that don’t, end up with siblings who won’t meet at Christmas. This chapter is about the difference.
Chapter Ten – Reputation External or internal? Reputation is built slowly and lost quickly – and most leaders focus on the external version while the internal one determines everything else. This chapter is about what your team says about you when you’re not in the room, and why that matters more than anything you put on a website.