Introduction

Leadership - a word I’ve often felt quite uncomfortable with while working in the world of tech startups for the last few years. Having good ideas, working with others to make an idea come to life and making something of value in the process is what I’ve been I’ve been working on, and the word “leadership” in that context feels like something from a parallel world.

I was awarded a fellowship by the Clore Leadership Programme just at the point where I was looking onto the world of startups and digital innovation. I was at that point involved a wide variety of different things to different degrees - a web agency, a record label, a design festival, a representative body for creative and cultural organisations (whatever that meant!), and lots of other things. I was spread thinly across many things, and doing the Clore leaderhips programme helped me focus on what I wanted to do.

This paper follows my story of moving from that situation to where I am today. I hope that some of the things I’ve learnt will be of use to others, and may trigger a few of those “oh yes! That’s exactly how I feel!” moments in others.

It’s about leadership in a loose way - in that this is a web book about how I learnt how to take ideas and quickly make them into things. But it’s mainly about leading from the front, and bringing others along with you as you go, it’s the network effect of being part of a change in the way that things get done, where there’s no textbook to teach us.

It’s about hacking, having a playful approach, but learning when to get serious about an idea.

Hack, play, learn. It’s an approach I’ve taken to heart in everything I do.

Stop feeding the beast ⇢

Introduction

Stop feeding the beast

Get back to the craft

Let a thousand flowers bloom

Hack it in a day

Kill your darlings

Just do one thing

Go wide, go narrow, go wide again

Get good at getting fast

Not that kind of hack

Hack, play, learn

Explora labora torium

Think before you hack

And then what?

The hack is the message

How to decide what to make

Fail in parallel

Hack It Forward

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