Hi, I’m Geoff Marlow
In the summer of 2025 I decided to bite the bullet on feedback that people found my Substack channel “informative, but difficult to navigate” and “Why don’t you just write it up in a book?” I then discovered that when you start writing a book, sometimes the book starts rewriting you…
So “just writing it up” has morphed into a kind of sabbatical. I say “kind of” because I do still get lured out of my cave for speaking engagements or the occasional compelling coaching or consulting collaboration.
Back in the 1980s I was managing projects, leading teams, and coaching individuals at a world-class innovation lab here in Cambridge UK.
One day, a longstanding client said to me: “Geoff – we like working with your people. In fact we like working with your people more than with our own people. You couldn’t come and make our people behave more like your people, could you?”
Some questions are fateful. That one shaped the next forty years of my career helping organisations throughout Europe, Asia, and the US create cultures of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness for themselves, by themselves.
I started out without a theory, just lived experience as a technology professional working in organisations whose cultures were either innovative, agile, and adaptive or not so much.
Over the years, my clients and I built up a substantial body of practice-based evidence revealing how workplace cultures form, and how they can be reformed by the people who work there so the organisation is able to thrive in an increasingly uncertain and unpredictable world.
What next?
I’ve published more than 150 perspectives on what my clients and I discovered together on the front lines. Several are featured (with links to the full articles) under the Resources menu above. You’ll also find a set of explainer videos (eight episodes, total runtime 44 minutes), along with other presentations, conversations, and interviews. There’s also a download link for a 22-page summary of the Five Fatal Habits that consistently prevent organisations from becoming future-fit.
I’ll post updates here as the book starts to take shape.
Watch this space.
But maybe don’t hold your breath…