Effective leadership in 2026 will require one great element: courage. That's where my CLARITY model starts and where most of us stall. As I say in my Keynotes, we need the ' Courage to Challeng e' our aims, methods, processes, goals, our people, our stakeholders and, most importantly, ourselves. Because leaders who don't have the courage to challenge themselves and invite challenge from others will continue in a downward spiral of their own limiting assumptions and beliefs. Y

Peter McLean's Regular Newsletter on Leadership and Strategy Issue#16, December 2025 Happy end-of-year, Christmas, New Year and all of that to you all! SEEING THROUGH THE FOG OF WAR When you get in the middle of the action, with all kinds of insanity and chaos starting to happen: people coming at you from every direction, policy changing around you on the fly, tariffs or not-tariffs changing during the night, Head of HR resigning due to pregnancy, supply chains disrupted, cus

From the CLARITY Insider series by Peter J. McLean — practical insights for leaders, organisers, and keynote sponsors. One of the most important things you can do as an event sponsor is to decide what outcome you want from a Keynote. Do you want your audience to be challenged , to make sense of everything they’ve heard, to be motivated to act, inspired , encouraged —or even intentionally made uncomfortable so they think differently? What do you actually want them to do when

It's easy to criticise the leader or senior leader - until you're the one in that position. Then suddenly you realise all of the pressures that were on them in the past. But that doesn't excuse the previous leader from having been rotten or managing poorly. Nor does it excuse you. It's a challenge to you: How will you proceed? Will you adopt the same manner and problems or will you change direction and do things differently? You will make mistakes. That comes with the territo

The "lonely at the top" feeling great leaders are supposed to have? Entirely self-inflicted. If you're leading people, you actually have no excuse to be lonely, because you should be sharing responsibility, vision, strategy, insight, needs, etc. And one thing you should always be doing is finding that sounding board of one or more trusted advisors with whom you can share and bounce ideas, perspectives, challenges, queries, hopes, dreams, road blocks and frustrations. Unfortun

What do you do with difficult conversations? One of the key factors in handling difficult conversations is to first identify two underlying aspects at play by asking yourself these two questions: 1) What is the principle reason for my need to address the person - Constructive or Destructive ? If it's constructive, then I am discussing something that will benefit others and our shared goals or is for the purpose of maintaining a standard or achieving an outcome that is of ben

I was reminded the other day of The Challenger Shuttle disaster . January 28, 1986, the Challenger shuttle, loaded with the first...

Peter McLean video - Leadership Under Pressure

You've seen the news about how McKinsey is reducing their workforce because AI can do their slide decks. But organisations and leaders don’t need another slide deck. They need clarity. They need traction. They need someone invested in working with them to achieve success.

Strategy rarely fails suddenly with fireworks and explosions. It fades. It drifts. It becomes the oh-so eloquent term, “meh.” But great leaders - the kind that recalibrate systems, teams, and themselves - stop and ask a different question:

We often say culture starts at the top. But it’s middle managers who carry it, bend it and, more often than we admit, bear the weight when it breaks. These leaders are the bridge between strategy and daily reality. They translate vision into action, hold the emotional tone of an organisation, and influence the climate where performance either thrives—or slowly deteriorates.

In leadership conversations, culture is often invoked as both the problem and the solution. It’s what’s blamed when things feel misaligned, and what’s celebrated when organisations thrive. But amid the urgency to change culture, one fundamental truth is often missed:

Strategy isn't about whether or not you use the "recommended" model or framework, whether that be Porter's 5 forces, Mckinsey's 7-S, the...

One of the great frustrations in business is the "pointless presentation," retreat, or development session. Just last week, someone...