What I Know Now: The Book
Governance theory tells you what a board should do, and that’s important. But it doesn’t tell you how.
This book is the how – worked out the hard way, over four decades at board level. Ten chapters, each one built around a mistake I made or watched someone else make, what I learned, and what I’d do differently now.
There’s no theory here that isn’t earned. Every chapter ends with a single question. Answer it honestly and you’ll know exactly which parts of this apply to you.
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 the Northern Ireland Children’s Hospice.
Why I wrote it
I’m 73. I still sit on boards. And most of what I know I had to learn the hard way.
That is why I wrote What I Know Now. Not a textbook or another theory of leadership. A short, practical book drawn from personal experience. It’s for people carrying responsibility now, who shouldn’t have to learn every lesson slowly when someone else already has.
I started writing down what would have helped most if I’d known it at the start of my board career. The things a good mentor would have explained about what makes boards effective, why leadership is almost entirely about behaviour, what culture is in practice, how strategies so often collapse without anyone quite admitting it, and why succession, growth and the difficult conversations are nearly always left until they become crises.
I didn’t write it to build a reputation or add something to my CV. I wrote it because there is no good reason for the next generation of business leaders to repeat mistakes that have already been made and learned from.
All author proceeds go to Northern Ireland Children’s Hospice. That decision was easy.
It’s thirty-five years of notes, stories and honest opinions from someone who has been through the maze. I’ve tried to make every page worth your time.
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.