Insights from 
Agilicist

Mid-sized UK firms say they ‘can’t get the talent.’ But this isn’t an HR problem - it’s a strategy problem. Just like football clubs that build academies outperform those that only buy stars, businesses that design better jobs, embed learning, and hire for adaptability scale faster and lose fewer people. Talent shortages vanish when you treat talent as a system, not a shopping list.

As your company grows, the leadership model that got you here won’t get you there. Bottlenecked decisions, frustrated teams, and missed opportunities are signs you’re still leading like a start-up. To perform at scale, leaders must stop being heroes and start being hosts - designing systems that empower decision-makers at every level.

Most organisations obsess over outputs, some have shifted to outcomes - but the real competitive edge lies in systems. Nick Saban’s “process” and Sir Dave Brailsford’s “marginal gains” both prove the same point: you don’t win by chasing wins. You win by building the system that makes them inevitable.

Napoleon never had a Gantt chart, a Jira board, or a weekly steering committee. What he did have was rarer in today’s enterprises: clarity, adaptability, and relentless execution. The same principles that let him outwit armies twice his size are the ones most enterprises ignore - and it’s why strategies stall, portfolios bloat, and empires (or companies) collapse. The lesson? Victory doesn’t belong to the biggest, but to the most focused, adaptable, and disciplined.