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Thought for your table.
Pull up a chair, pour yourself some tea, or a G&T, and experience a bit of blue sky thinking about SME business, the minds that make them and other topics for our changing world.
Below are Business. Better. and TableTalk, a blog and a podcast.
Exploring ideas and experiences
of people who build things.
TableTalk
Thinking on strategy, structure,
and systems that drive growth.
Business. Better.
TableTalk
TableTalk is a long-form podcast exploring the lives, ideas and experiences of
people who build things. Many guests are founders, entrepreneurs, business owners
and creators. Others may be artists, athletes, investors, community leaders
or simply people who have chosen unusual paths through life. What unites them
is not a profession, but a mindset. They have built something.
The show combines one-to-one conversations with group discussions, focusing on the realities of life, change, creativity, reinvention and entrepreneurship.
Many guests have reached a point where success alone is no longer the question. Conversations often shift towards purpose, meaning, contribution, adventure, learning and what comes next.
We film in our London Bridge studio and occasionally on the road. We recently spent 2 days on stage at Ideas Fest where we interviewed 50 founders, from legends like Simon Woodfroffe and Henry Engelhardt to relative newcomers in accessible fashion and whiskey. See YouTube and our other socials for content.
Building an interesting life comes in many forms.
The Missing Half - Pt. 1
So often women are overlooked.
Female led businesses are rarely funded.
When women reach a certain age, they are often discarded.
And, to add a little icing to that cake, much of society still treats 50% of itself as not really serious.
This poses the question I guess: Why Invest in Women?
Ed Fowkes
2 days ago5 min read
When Speed Stops Working
There is a wonderful stage in the life of a business when almost nothing is properly organised.
And yet somehow, everything works.
It’s early days, there are two, or six or eight of you. Everyone knows what everyone else is doing. Decisions happen across desks, leaning over from a chair, on WhatsApp, over coffee or halfway through a conversation about something completely different.
Ed Fowkes
Sep 215 min read
Founder as Architect
Let’s look at Toyota, as it offers one of the clearest examples to my mind. Toyota’s famous production system isn't simply a collection of clever manufacturing techniques. It changes the environment in which people work.
One of its best-known principles is that problems should become visible immediately. Toyota developed the famous andon system (アンドン), where a worker who spotted a problem could pull a cord to summon help and, if necessary, stop the production line.
Ed Fowkes
Sep 155 min read
First-Order Thinking
I think the first time I can recall coming across this idea was reading Naomi Klein's wonderful No Logo around the turn of the millennium, when she wrote about something called Marlboro Friday. Philip Morris's share price fell by around 23% in a single day. If even Marlboro now had to compete primarily on price, perhaps that brand value wasn't worth what everyone thought it was.
Ed Fowkes
Aug 295 min read
Measurement
I have a soft spot for Tesco, having grown up around the corner from where Mr Cohen had his market stall. And in the 1990s, around the time I first started in business, Tesco became famous for understanding something rather more valuable than how much money had gone through its tills.
It wanted to understand customers. And to do so, it launched Clubcard.
Launched nationally in 1995, Clubcard gave Tesco detailed information about what people bought, how frequently they vis
Ed Fowkes
Aug 205 min read
Lag and Confusion
Have you noticed that cause and effect don’t seem to happen at the same time? The result is that one is hard to pin to the other.
Change your pricing today and you may not know the real effect for months.
Hire a great salesperson and their first few weeks tell you almost nothing.
Improve your culture and nobody hands you a graph on Friday showing a 7% increase in enthusiasm.
Spend money on marketing and the customer who notices you today might buy six months from now.
Ed Fowkes
Aug 165 min read
Invisible Loops
From the outside, we often apply simple labels to explain business performance.
"They're well run."
"They're lucky."
"They've lost their way."
"They're badly managed."
But those explanations don't really tell us very much. What we're usually seeing is something much more interesting. We're watching feedback loops at work.
Ed Fowkes
Aug 75 min read
Symptoms Are Expensive
Human beings are wired to respond to immediate threats. If something moved in the bushes, our ancestors didn’t convene a strategy meeting to investigate systemic causes. They reacted. And frankly, those who spent too long analysing the lion tended not to contribute greatly to the next generation. Businesses reward a different skill: Diagnosis.
Ed Fowkes
Jul 315 min read
Smart Businesses, Stupid Decisions
Why Do Smart Businesses Keep Making Stupid Decisions?
Every few months a story emerges that leaves the business world scratching its head.
We find ourselves asking “How could such an experienced leadership team possibly have approved that?”
The latest example comes from Starbucks.
A marketing campaign in South Korea rapidly descended into controversy after imagery and messaging echoed painful episodes from the country's modern history. Whether the campaign resulted
Ed Fowkes
Jul 105 min read
The Business Of Buildings
Property occupies a unique place in society. It underpins family wealth, institutional investment and national economies alike. Yet unlike businesses or shares, property has remained remarkably difficult to divide. It is steeped in historical and legal red tape, and unpeeling that is a challenge. If you wanted to own a building, commercial or residential, or even a development site, you still needed substantial capital or access to those who had it.
Today, that too is beginni
Ed Fowkes
Jul 35 min read
Crowd Becomes Capital
The democratisation of capital may prove to be one of the most significant economic shifts of our time.
For centuries, investing was largely reserved for those with significant wealth, connections or specialist knowledge. Common people could buy products from companies, work for companies and support companies, but direct participation in their growth was limited.
Why should investment opportunities be reserved for a relatively small group of people?
Ed Fowkes
Jun 256 min read
BrewDog
It is easy, in hindsight, to talk about mistakes. Unfortunately, the human condition often makes it much harder to remember the brilliance that came first. BrewDog did not begin as a corporate experiment. It began as a rebellion.
When James Watt and Martin Dickie launched their brewery in 2007 from a small industrial unit in Scotland, the beer market of what is now yesteryear looked tired and predictable. James and Martin’s response was inspired but simple: brew something lo
Ed Fowkes
Jun 245 min read
The Ownership Revolution
Over the past century something rather interesting has been happening. Ownership has slowly begun to spread.
Perhaps the most famous example in Britain is the John Lewis Partnership. John Spedan Lewis seems to have asked himself a philosophical question. Why should the people helping to create value not participate more directly in its rewards?
At the time, this was a remarkably radical idea...
Ed Fowkes
Jun 195 min read
Judgement and Excellence
At this point, a natural question emerges. If value is concentrated and effort eventually dilutes it, how do I decide where to focus? This is where measurement enters and with it, a new layer of distortion.
Charles Goodhart observed that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
Now before I continue, I’ll just say “Data is golden.” However…
Ed Fowkes
Jun 115 min read
Value Scales Unevenly
This week we’ll dive into effort, and why most activity feels like a waste of time and effort, and why life feels, generally, unfair.
Vilfredo Pareto was among the first to observe and document an uneven distribution pattern in economic systems. Roughly 80% of outcomes, he noted, tend to come from 20% of causes. The exact ratio shifts but the asymmetry persists. Once you begin to look for it, it appears everywhere. And most of us will know of and see the 80-20 rule at work.
Ed Fowkes
Jun 55 min read
The Game And Its Networks
Prefer to watch the video? I’ve been examining how we tend to misread reality. Specifically we miss how the systems we build move and change over time. We expect linear change, but we get a series of curves. First we looked at growth, and how these are already complex wave forms. Then we looked at distribution and how both value and effort tends to form clusters rather than show up evenly. Today I embark on Part 3 of the series and I look at The Game we play and the effect
Ed Fowkes
May 299 min read
Push and Pull
Beneath much of business, economics and technology sit recurring, structural patterns. Curves, distributions and constraints that appear again and again across nature, physics, networks and human behaviour. Once seen, they become difficult to ignore. And like much of science and its laws, the maths behind these patterns is hard to break or to work against.
Ed Fowkes
May 225 min read
Our Non-Linear World
People spend their lives trying to make sense of systems they cannot fully see.
For founders, those of us trying to run a business, markets move, technologies emerge, competitors rise, margins tighten and audiences shift.
Looking in, some businesses seem to catch momentum effortlessly while others push endlessly uphill for very little reward. The natural instinct is to explain these outcomes through talent, intelligence, discipline or luck. While there are always elements o
Ed Fowkes
May 156 min read
AI - Add-on or Redesign
As AI removes friction from execution, the limiting factor becomes:
What are we fighting for?
What matters most right now?
What does good actually look like?
This kind of judgement is actually the thing that successful entrepreneurs have always been good at. Those of us with an abundant mindset have always managed to leverage others into action, and achieved strangely unbelievable things in the process.
Ed Fowkes
May 86 min read
Why Different Minds Win
Those of us whose minds wish to wander, need guardrails in order to achieve results that make an intentionally positive difference alongside the freedom to maintain happiness. Without these we can easily find ourselves becoming lost souls swimming in a fish bowl.
And it is often surprising, for the less creative, just how much benefit ‘playtime’ can bring. Did you know that Post-it Notes, a multi-billion dollar product, came from playing around with something already deemed
Ed Fowkes
May 16 min read
Business. Better.
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