Juliet in Posthaven

What My Teenage Daughter taught me about boys (and leadership).

I don't know about you, but I've been loving this year's Six Nations Rugby. Watching a game turn on its head from a single moment’s loss of concentration, and seeing seasoned players taught a thing or two by underdogs as they rise up and surprise everyone — probably themselves most of all, has helped swallow the bitter pill of watching our National team lose. I never used to think of sport as one of life’s best leadership classrooms, but as I get older — and as sports coaching becomes more thoughtful, more positive, and more attuned to equality and mental health — I can see there are countless lessons to be taken from team sports.

So it felt rather auspicious to bump into my youngest daughter’s old form tutor at the local rugby club and be reminded just how much a parent can learn from their children. This brave young woman had once spearheaded a school trip up Mount Toubkal, the highest peak in North Africa’s Atlas Mountains — a truly gruelling, Bear Grylls-style expedition. “What goes up the mountain must come down the mountain,” became a favourite mantra from that time, and I still remember how bone-tired everyone looked when they slumped off the minibus on their return.

The following year my daughter was made Head Girl, and I credit much of that success to how she tackled that Toubkal trip — a trip the school still offers to this day.

It was around the same time that her all-girls state school merged classes with the boys’ school next door. The transition was met with consternation by some girls and their parents, and reluctant acceptance by others (why fix what isn't broken?), but it transformed conversations around our dinner table, where our daughter would often deliver a running commentary on sociology, anthropology… and hair.

“Mum, I sit behind this boy with amazing hair in Science and I just want to run my hands through it.”

Fair.

Quite quickly the schools fully merged, and the observations improved. Her masterpiece was a dramatic reenactment of boys leaving a classroom:

“Miss, miss! I got this.”
Misses light switch.
“It’s okay miss, I got this.”
Misses again.
“I GOT THIS.”
Hits switch. Lights off. Triumph.
“See miss!”
Accidentally turns them back on.
“I got this miss!”
Misses…

Meanwhile, four boys remain jammed in the doorway because they all tried to exit at once.

But one moment in particular has always stayed with me.

My daughter was explaining to a horrified friend — appalled at the idea of even sharing space with boys — why she didn’t mind sitting on a sofa between two boys at prefect meetings.

“If you actually watch them,” she said, “although they can be loud and physically dominant in a room, they also think deeply and are really good at relating and responding to each other, as if they’re learning and operating like a team — which is sweet.”

I, attempting to retain my position as wise and all-knowing, replied,
“So boys are basically just like girls but with different body parts.”

She looked at me with pity.

“No. Boys separate into two types, mum: twats and lovable twats. Not like girls at all.”

Honestly? I think she’s onto something.

There’s a leadership lesson in there somewhere about intent, teamwork, and judging people by character rather than noise level. Leadership, it turns out, looks a lot like rugby, mountains… and teenage boys — though I suspect she’d say I’m overthinking it.

She’s nearly through uni now. Her advice column launches soon. Naturally, I’ll be first in line to subscribe.

Don't Build a Brand - Build a Community

Back in 2017 I wrote about  six ways to be the best, I'd been a big fan of GL Hoffman*** creator of the blog 'What Would Dad Say?' GL had invited me to write a guest post in 2010 and can be credited for me discovering the joys of blogging. When I wrote 'Six Ways to Be the Best', I was working in a large, linear organisation that behaved on the outside like a people-centred organisation but didn't feel like one from the inside. As I revisit articles from long, long ago I've been inspired to look again, from the perspective of branding, which continues to be the main focus of many companies public-facing activity. Is it really all about the brand?

Don’t Build a Brand. Build a Community.

You might be able to guess the originators of the quotes… “If you want to milk the cow, give it good grass.”

It’s a simple idea, almost agricultural in its honesty, yet it captures the essence of sustainable business better than most strategy decks ever will. Value does not come from extraction; it comes from care. Whether your “cow” is a customer, a team, or a flagship product, the same rule applies: nurture first, benefit later.

This is why great organisations don’t obsess over branding alone — they obsess over belonging.

Walk in the Right Shoes

“Take off your management shoes and regularly walk in your customers’ shoes.”
“Take off your management shoes and regularly walk in your staff’s shoes.”

Leadership from a distance is convenient, but it’s also dangerous. Dashboards, reports, KPIs, and feedback summaries are useful — but they are representations, not reality.

Do you know what it feels like to be your own customer this month?

Make time to find out. Stand in line. Use the product. Navigate the systems. Work the tills. Spend a shift alongside your staff. You can employ the best consultants and secret shoppers in the world, but none of them will ever equal the insight gained from experiencing your organisation firsthand.

You are never too important to let your feet touch the ground.

Never Say Goodbye

“Never say goodbye, always ‘see you again.’” If you aren’t aiming for repeat business, you shouldn’t be in business at all.

Customers who don’t return are a warning sign — of complacency, lack of ambition, or a failing experience. Eventually, organisations that don’t prioritise return relationships become inward-looking. They fossilise. Dinosaur thinking takes hold.

Growth isn’t always about scale, volume, or footprint. Sometimes growth is simply deepening relationships — even (and especially) in large organisations. If you believe in your organisation, make it possible for people outside it to believe too.

That belief doesn’t come from slogans. It comes from consistency, care, and connection.

Don’t build a brand. Build a community. A strong brand can attract buyers. A strong community turns people into advocates who voluntarily recommend, defend, and improve what you offer.

Mind the Cash Cow

If you have a major seller — a product, service, or outlet that carries the business — ask yourself an uncomfortable question:

Are your senior leaders spending enough time with it? Valuing it. Nurturing it. Keeping it healthy. If not, why not? No excuses.

The heart of your business is your cash cow. Everything flows from its centre. If leadership assumes it’s “running itself,” manages it from a distance, or stops giving it one-to-one attention, the fall isn’t a possibility — it’s a certainty.

Be the River, Not the Rock

“Flow. Be the river, not the rock.”

Being a solid, reliable organisation — a “rock” — is admirable. But time passes. Markets shift. People change. Technology reshapes behaviour. Rocks don’t adapt; they erode.

Rivers endure because they move.

Design your organisation with flow. Build processes that reflect how people actually behave — desire routes, not rigid corridors. When obstacles appear, they become visible. When challenges arise, fluid organisations move around them instead of being blocked by them.

Stagnation kills communities. Movement sustains them.

Brands are built on messages. Communities are built on experiences.

If you want loyalty, don’t chase attention — earn trust.
If you want longevity, don’t manage from above — engage from within.
If you want growth, don’t harden — flow.

Don’t build a brand. Build a community, because a brand is a promise you make.

A community is a promise people make to each other.

The second one is far more powerful.


The original article can be found here: https://juliet.posthaven.com/from-the-archives-six-ways-to-be-the-best

***GL Hoffman, is the creator of  JobDig, a career search and employment guide. He then created and launched the incredibly successful LinkUp, an American job search engine that search’s jobs from almost 22,000 company websites! I don't believe he is related to LinkedIn's co-founder, but just like LinkedIn -  LinkUp is still going ....

January


Buried beneath the muck and slips of mud
Part frozen, part thawed
Squeezed between a layer cake of root,
Trammelled into soup beneath hoof and boot
A husk without, a tiny seed shrivelled within
From so many years of re-cycling.
The holding pattern before coming in to land
The way station, the motorway tail-back
The meal you cooked that tasted bland
The sleep that refuses to stay long
The clothes you can no longer put on
Sliding across the greasy linoleum of life
Cold flannel, hot towel
Scissored into pieces by the weight of decay
The sweeping hand of time that stays.
The fall of winter, the rise of spring,
A drawn out malingering.
The footfall of to-ing and fro-ing, back and forth
The rush to get nowhere, impatience, slap-dash
The totally unreliable source,
The queues of doom
The waiting rooms
Hanging along the fence and posts of lanes
Spider webs of arteries
Swinging in the winds that blow
Connecting to the beating heart that goes too slow
In the somnambulant tick and whine
A leaf shuddering between time

©JulietB 2022

The biggest lie of our time? "One size fits all"

I read a lovely article commenting on a Big Issue article this week, talking about a new, and so far, successful housing scheme (the Harbour Project) for people previously struggling with homelessness, and one comment struck me “We can’t just keep churning people through sausage factories. It works for some people. It doesn’t work for everyone. You know, no model works for everyone. But this seems to be a new model which is working for, you know, a group of people right across the capital for whom other services have failed time and time again.” and I thought "Yeah. You’re not wrong" — and honestly, that quote nails something we collectively keep pretending isn’t true.
“One size does not, and will not ever fit all.”
That’s not radical. That’s just… reality.

But we keep acting like it’s a controversial opinion because admitting it forces responsibility.
“Efficiency” and “cost-effectiveness” are often just polite language for simplification. Systems love tidy categories. People are not tidy. When the two clash, we don’t redesign the system — we blame the people who don’t fit. That’s how you end up with phrases like “hard to reach” or “non-compliant” instead of “this model doesn’t work for them.”

What really struck me in the article was this bit:
a group of people for whom other services have failed time and time again
That flips the script. It’s not that people “failed the system”; the system failed them. Repeatedly. And yet we still act surprised when pushing them through the same sausage factory again doesn’t magically work this time.

Why do we allow the myth to continue?

A few uncomfortable reasons:
Uniform systems are easier to fund and defend politically. Variation looks messy on a spreadsheet.
Admitting “one size fits all” is false means admitting harm was preventable. That’s a hard reckoning.
There’s a quiet moral comfort in standardisation. If everyone gets the same thing, we can claim fairness — even when outcomes are wildly unequal.

And, frankly, listening properly costs time, imagination, and humility. Those don’t scale neatly.
What’s hopeful about the scheme I mentioned — and why the Big Issue piece matters — is that it doesn’t pretend to be the solution. It’s a solution. For some people. And that should be enough to justify it.

Real intelligence isn’t about forcing complexity into straight lines. It’s about designing systems that bend without breaking the people inside them.

So yes — this is exactly something we should all be looking at. Not because it’s perfect, but because it finally starts from an honest premise:
People are different.
Needs are different.
And pretending otherwise is neither efficient nor humane.

Honestly? The truly irrational thing is how long we’ve kept calling the myth “common sense.”

You can read an article about the Harbour Project here https://www.bigissue.com/news/housing/harbour-project-london-housing-first-homelessness/

© JLB, Jan 2026

The “Blister Pack Boys”: Turning an Overlooked Waste Problem into a Call for Action

The Blister Pack Boys: Why Two Retirees Are Challenging an NHS Waste Blind Spot

In the space of just one year, Piers Nicholson and Anthony Warley have become known across South Wiltshire as the “Blister Pack Boys.”

Back in 2024, Piers (90) and Anthony (70) decided to do something about a problem most of us barely notice: the vast number of pharmaceutical blister packs that are not being properly recycled.

Blister packs are widely used as unit-dose packaging for tablets and capsules. They protect medication, extend shelf life, and offer some tamper resistance. Their introduction was originally supported by a Government Health Committee as a way of reducing the ease with which pills in bottles could be misused in attempts to end life.

But while blister packs serve an important purpose, they also present a serious environmental challenge.

Made from two different types of aluminium bonded together, blister packs cannot be placed in standard household recycling. Separating these materials is technically complex and costly. As a result, an estimated 1.5 million blister packs end up in landfill each year in the UK.

The fundamental issue is economic: the value of the recycled materials is far lower than the cost of recycling them.

There are currently only two specialist recycling companies able to process blister packs, both of which charge for providing and returning collection boxes. Some retailers have attempted to help. Superdrug has run an intermittent collection scheme, while Boots operates a points-based initiative with strict time limits, for their advantage card holders. Neither, however, works well for larger volumes or delivers a sustainable, long-term solution.

Anthony, a retired Respiratory Consultant and General Physician, and Piers, a retired sundial maker and founder of the Fleet Street Heritage Project, share a determination to tackle this conundrum. Their aim is to encourage NHS England and pharmaceutical companies to work towards a new, practical approach—one that addresses this untenable waste problem through innovation, collaboration, and awareness-raising.

In January 2025, supported by a small team of volunteers, Piers and Anthony purchased a recycling container from MYGroup and held their first public blister-pack collection event in Salisbury Market Place, with support from local artisan bakery Hendersons. One year on, and nearly 100,000 blister packs later diverted from landfill, they could feel justifiably proud. Instead, they simply say there is still work to be done.

If you know of any groups, organisations, or community networks that might be interested in hosting a short, informal talk on this subject, please let me know and I will happily pass on your details.

Sometimes meaningful change starts not with policy papers or committees, but with people who refuse to ignore a problem—no matter their age.


From the archives: Making It Work

Originally posted on Medium, Jan 27, 2022

Come for a little amble with me?

The one thing I love about Facebook (sorry that should be ‘Meta’) is the way it regurgitates your photos and posts from, well, since before time began it often seems. These ‘memories’ that it shows you privately; like some personal pick and mix of embarrassing, over enthusiastic, self-pitying, celebratory snapshots of your past that you may or may not be interested in sharing again depending on whether you treat FB like a curated collection of the best moments in your life or as an echo chamber of your crazy, needy, chaotic mind, or somewhere in between. Sometimes (or everytime depending on what kind of person you are, I guess) a gem fights it’s way to the top of the heap.

I found one today, a reminder of a course I ran and part devised during a meeting with Helen Le Broq (then Director of Oxford Youth Arts Partnership) at a Services Café north of Oxford one snowy winter’s afternoon. Helen took away our notes and conversations, and set about turning a concern - a frustration with a broken system into a solution. She sourced partners at Oxford Brookes and other creative freelancers and lo! A new star in Arts training was born ‘Making It Work’ as part of ‘The Stepping It Up — Young Leaders’ project.

https://oyaptrust.wordpress.com/2011/07/21/what-a-year/?fbclid=IwAR1CwpFA3Rh7DfufFniZXEoXrpGo-mXwnXOOQMJL7tuprlvXd_KjeZmc9Mc

‘Stepping It Up’ was created to address the growing rise of graduates in the creative sector who having graduated from college or university and having been working in the Creative sector were floundering, principally because their business skills were not as rigorous as their creative skills. OYAP would offer a handful of creatives; the chance to work with OYAP on devising, setting up, running and delivering a creative project, to be mentored by a matched creative with years of expertise. A core part of this package was a series of day training courses on everything from project management, to self-assessment tax returns and project evaluation. In short, a condensed package of everything a young creative just starting out would need to know in order to run their own freelance business. A toolbox that (and this is where it began) Helen and I felt every University and College should be offering as part of their courses to ALL young people on creative arts courses, in order to equip them to operate in a highly successful, highly competitive, highly lucrative Industry/Sector.

I used to run the ‘unappealing’ training day on Self-Assessment, with a little bit of ‘self-selling’ to make it more bearable. I met some remarkable creatives during the six years it ran. I was privileged to mentor two incredible young women. The best outcome was that the Inland Revenue now makes Tax Returns and Self-Assesment a whole lot easier and simpler accompanied by You Tube videos and less jargon-based worksheets. Not directly becuase of MIW but I like to think our public social media articles and conversations around the challenges of Self-Employment Tax and business skills for young people in non-business environments, helped.

I also, would let people play with my LinkedIn profile by way of demonstrating the whole —” why say that, when you can say this?” and “what’s missing here?” type thing. Which was great until I changed internet provider and lost my password to LinkedIn and had a gobble-de-gook profile for six years which made me giggle and confounded friends looking me up. I still laugh at the cunning musician, who during a lunch break changed my LinkedIn profile to ‘Paper Clip Pusher” on my laptop, it could have been a lot worse. I still think LinkedIn should set up an area for young people starting out, where they can play with setting up their profiles and allowing them to comment on other peoples (in that area), making positive suggestions to help them improve the impact of their profiles on the platform.

And now, here I am many years on and Stepping It Up has evolved, through funding and interest, into something altogether different. I’m still making my way through life, jobs and self-assessment as best I can with those fond memories that thanks to an algorithm have put a smile on my face today.

© JulietB. Jan 27, 2022