Mike's latest e-book - the final in the four book series
Two fish are swimming along and pass an older fish. The older fish asks, 'How's the water?' One of the young fish turns to the other and says, 'What water?'
What if the most powerful forces shaping your leadership are the ones you cannot see?
Most leaders work on content: strategy, structure, targets, talent, metrics. When performance stalls, they reach for more precision, more discipline, more activity. What Water? argues the real leverage sits elsewhere entirely - in Context, the invisible environment that decides how situations occur to people, and therefore how they perform.
Context is the water. It is not strategy, not a values statement, not mood. It is the frame of interpretation within which Identity stabilises, Commitment strengthens or erodes, and Action becomes obvious or impossible. Leaders swim in it daily - quarterly rhythms, the silent agreements about what success means - yet rarely stop to ask what water they are swimming in, and how that impacts the choices and actions they take.
Drawing on phenomenology and ontology, the book shows why the most decisive events in organisational life never appear in a spreadsheet. They happen in this unseen atmosphere of meaning. More importantly, it offers a disciplined practice for noticing Context, deliberately designing it, and shifting it when it has quietly drifted.
This book completes the Operating Primer. You cannot change the water until you can see it.
Prefer a podcast rather than a read? Click to the left for 48 minutes of informative conversation on the contents of What Water?
Above the Ceiling
Most leaders believe their results are constrained by market conditions, strategy, capability or resources. Above the Ceiling argues something more confronting: the real constraint is Identity.
Every leader operates within an inherited way of being shaped by past success. That Identity filters risk, moderates ambition and protects coherence. It has delivered results. It has also established a ceiling. When Commitment to a bigger future collides with the Identity that produced the past, the future is quietly recalibrated downward. Nothing collapses. Performance remains respectable. Range does not expand.
This book sits within the Operating Primer series and examines the hinge between Commitment and Results. It shows how Identity governs interpretation, behaviour and enterprise momentum. It exposes the structural reasons transformation efforts stall and explains why strategy alone cannot lift performance beyond reinforced limits.
More importantly, it provides a disciplined pathway for translating declared future into required Identity, sustaining that stance under pressure, and designing Context to reinforce it.
The ceiling is rarely imposed. It is reinforced. The question is no longer whether you understand the model. It is whether you are willing to inhabit the Identity your future requires.
Prefer a podcast rather than a read? Click to the left for 42 minutes of informative conversation on the contents of Above the Ceiling.
The Commitment Advantage
What separates teams that merely perform from those that truly break through?
The Commitment Advantage reveals that extraordinary results are not the product of luck, talent, or relentless effort - they are the predictable outcomes of one thing: commitment. This e-book explores how leaders can generate, sustain, and renew commitment to achieve results beyond the predictable.
The Commitment Advantage reframes leadership as a practice of being, not just doing. It shows how leaders shift from compliance to commitment, where people act not because they must but because it matters. Leaders need to recognise they can break through performance plateaus by reframing context and identity. There are simple ways to build practices and rituals that keep the flame of commitment alive irrespective of changing circumstances. There are also ways to navigate the shadows of commitment - overreach, rigidity, and quiet drift - with honesty and renewal.
Most importantly, breakthrough performance comes from leading from identity, aligning with who you are with what you stand for.
It is not a book about motivation. It is a book about who you are being as a leader, and how that shapes what becomes possible for everyone around you. Because compliance sustains, but commitment transforms.
Prefer a podcast rather than a read? Click to the left for 48 minutes of informative conversation on the contents of The Commitment Advantage.
Re-Authoring Leadership
Most leadership books focus on what leaders should do. This book asks a different question: Who are you being while you lead?
Re-Authoring Leadership explores the hidden structures that shape how leaders interpret the world, respond under pressure, and define what is possible. It argues that leadership is not simply a matter of strategy, capability, or execution, but of perception, identity, and meaning-making.
The stories leaders carry about themselves become the boundaries of their leadership. The patterns they repeat become the limits of their organisations. The assumptions they stop questioning quietly become the future they produce.
Drawing on phenomenology, ontology, identity theory, behavioural psychology, and real-world leadership case studies from around the globe, this book examines how leaders experience and interpret reality, why identity both empowers and constrains leadership, how inherited patterns become invisible leadership scripts, how leaders reshape collective identity and culture, and what it means to consciously re-author the story you are living and leading.
For leaders willing to question inherited assumptions, confront the limits of old identities, and lead beyond autopilot, Re-Authoring Leadership offers a different kind of invitation:
Not to perform leadership better. But to become someone capable of producing a different future.
Prefer a podcast rather than a read? Click to the left for 46 minutes of informative conversation on the contents of The Commitment Advantage.
When leaders play ordinary, the organisation can only play ordinary.
When leaders play Extraordinary, the organisation can transform.
As leaders, we sometimes achieve Extraordinary results in business and our lives, yet never really understand what it takes for these to happen more than just every now and then. What if we could more regularly and reliably deliver Extraordinary?
In Being Extraordinary, Mike shares his model of mindsets and practices to set you on the pathway for Extraordinary results. By confronting ordinary leadership practices, the 'Model for Extraordinary' explains the necessary conditions that enable Extraordinary outcomes to flourish.
Packed with plenty of practical experiences and insightful anecdotes, Mike illustrates how he developed and applied the model throughout his business career.
Click Add to Cart for paperback, Kindle for Kindle, Apple Books for an audio version or all other e-books using the e-book icon. Review by NZ Management Magazine.
Would you like to preview of some of the contents?
Click on any of the images below to go to the relevant snippet Mike has posted on LinkedIn.
These are around 500 words, so a digestible and insightful three minutes of reading.
Changing Our Stories
We do not practice the most cost-effective and underutilised leadership practice there is – reflection.
Voicing the Unsaid
The Unsaid conversation is the one that never actually gets beyond someone’s internal chatter.
Give Up Being Right
Our Identity is the automatic impulse for our need to be right.
Context Matters
Developing and adapting organisational context is the primary responsibility of leadership.
I am 100% Accountable
My commitment is “I am 100% accountable for everything that is happening around me, all the time”.
