Insights
Built for What's Next: Six Questions Worth Asking Yourself
We talk a lot about getting the elephants out of the room.
Sometimes the biggest elephant is the conversation we haven’t had with ourselves.
Are we building what we genuinely want, or simply getting better at doing what we’ve always done?
Curtis Scaplen shares six questions worth asking yourself before you figure out what’s next. Not what your business needs. Not what others expect. What you actually want.
This week in our Leadership In Focus Newsletter.
Built for What's Next: The Life Behind the Ambition
Balance is a myth. And most of us already know it.
The version we’ve been sold — perfectly divided time, equal energy in every direction — sets us up to feel like we’re always getting something wrong.
Curtis Scaplen, co-founder of Leadership In Focus, has been sitting with a different question: what are we actually trying to build, and does the life behind it match the ambition driving it?
This piece isn’t about slowing down. It’s about being intentional — knowing why you’re making the choices you’re making, and whether they’re pointing toward something that’s actually yours.
Worth a read if you’re in a season of building and have started wondering what you’re building it for.
The Problem With Hitting Your Numbers
Several years ago I was told, mid-year, not to worry too much about a target we were clearly going to miss.
Then the performance reviews came in. Just the number, and the gap.
That experience reinforces something called Goodhart's Law: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. And the more I've thought about it, the more I've seen it play out everywhere: from nail factories to Pfizer boardrooms to quarterly earnings calls where executives admit they'd kill a profitable project rather than miss a number.
Hitting your targets feels like winning. But sometimes it's the most expensive thing you can do.
This week I'm writing about the hidden cost of how we measure success — and what to do about it.
The Best Loyalty Program Costs Nothing
I spent years building and running a loyalty program.
Points structures. Redemption catalogues. Breakage calculations. Vendor relationships. System integrations. It was complex, creative, and genuinely one of my favourite stretches of my career.
But the whole time, there was a question I couldn't quite get away from: are loyalty programs solving the right problem? Or are they a workaround for something more fundamental?
Then I found an honest mechanic. And he answered it for me.
This week's post is about the loyalty program that costs nothing, and generates more word-of-mouth than any structured program I've ever seen.