The rise of the business coach 💼 ⚽
Welcome to the 32 new subscribers since our last email, if you are new here, my name is Jimmy McLoughlin, a former Downing Street adviser turned podcaster. I write this notebook on the most interesting things I have seen on the future of work, jobs, technology and politics.
The surge in subscribers was probably due to three factors:
The spicy Michelle Donelan anecdote being covered in The Times
Our CBI piece from last week being covered in Politico and
Playing around with Substacks notes, a new feature that I write about below
This week we are covering the following:
🎧 The rise of business coaching and a very British cult (Times article)
📺 Stacey Dooley: Ready for War
🚜 Clarkson’s Farm
✍️ Substack Notes
☀️ Eliza Filby: Is the golden State losing its shine?
We are deep in planning around marking our 100th episode in early May. We are distilling all the lessons we have learnt, make sure you subscribe to hear about our plans.
First up, here is the YouTube video for our interview with Michelle Donelan. (Skip to exactly 32 mins to hear the spicy story that The Times picked up🌶️🌶️ )
🎧 The power of modern coaching and a very British cult
When I have spoke to friends about the idea of getting some coaching to help me figure out what I wanted to do with my life post No.10, I could sense some scepticism.
Isn’t it all whishy washy nonsense?
And I understood this point, I too get hit with instagram ads from various people telling me they can help scale my business from £15k a month to £150k a month. I am curious so I click (and feed the algo’s even more) and you examine the and can see a lot is just bullsh!t artists.
But at an even more sinister level, there is what what Catrin Nye and Jamie Bartlett have produced with a Very British Cult. (Bartlett produced one of first ever podcast loves, the cryptocurrency queen)
The interesting part of the story is how it starts as a reading group. Clearly some very able people were taken in, such individuals who were planning solo expeditions to the South Pole for example.
The series which I finished in just a few days is a very interesting exploration of human psychology and the sunk fallacy cost that we can all be guilty of, although I hope you never lose £100k as some of those in the story did.
There are by some estimates almost 100,000 life coaches operating in the UK.
8 half hour episodes, I found a very British Cult gripping.
As I say, overall, I am a big proponent of the power of business coaching, and I wrote this piece for the Times on Bill Campbell from August 2020.
Bill Campbell may not be a household business name like Steve Jobs, Larry Page, Eric Schmidt, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai and Sheryl Sandberg — but they all owe an enormous debt to the man they learnt from and who, thanks to their combined success, acquired the nickname “Trillion Dollar Coach”. With Silicon Valley known for its big technology rivalries, the fact that one person was able to transcend so many of its companies and coach their top executives speaks volumes.
Campbell was once an American football coach at Columbia University and he took the principles into the boardroom. As with most top sports coaches, he was more interested in letting the players do the talking. There are few recorded interviews with him, although Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg’s book Trillion Dollar Coach is a good summary of his methods.
The role of a coach is gaining ground in Britain at all levels of business. It can be difficult to draw a distinction between it and a mentor. Mentors have a long history, the word originating from the Odyssey. Such relationships often can be ad hoc, not formalised. They have a tendency to be drawn from people’s existing circles, which can stymy social mobility.
The process is becoming more standardised across the working world. Euan Blair set up White Hat to allow mentoring for future apprentices at some of the world’s biggest companies, such as Facebook and Bloomberg. Guider AI is working with big companies such as Marks & Spencer to help to maximise their mentorship programmes and to increase variety. Joe Seddon has set up Zero Gravity to connect underprivileged people with existing students to be mentors when they apply to Russell Group universities.
The challenges facing Britain’s economic growth are plentiful, but a long-term trend that has existed for some time is a lack of business and management skills. In the United States there is a well-trodden path of undergraduate degree to MBA. Whether the advanced degrees are worth the exorbitant cost is the subject of debate, but students undoubtedly come out with a more well-rounded understanding of business areas. There is a reason for the inflation-busting price increases since the turn of the century (the most expensive ten MBAs all break the $200,000 barrier). Business coaching offers a slightly different but more targeted approach.
The demand for business coaching is growing in Britain, particularly among entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurship has rocketed as a career choice, but, if you are successful in the initial stages, the skills required dramatically change — starting in your garage requires a totally different skill-set to when you are managing ten, fifty or a hundred employees. Campbell was instrumental in helping Mr Bezos when there was an attempt to move him from chief executive to chairman at Amazon.
Campbell was the first renowned business coach, but a new generation is coming to the fore who have had successful business careers in investment banking and technology start-ups. Mica Vaipan, Toby Moore and Divinia Knowles all had impressive careers before making the switch to coaching. There has been a surge in people searching for business coaching since lockdown as we grapple with myriad new challenges in our professional and personal lives.
Business coaching is a new and growing part of our economy, but it is quite poorly defined. There are as many types of business coaches as there are types of accountants and bankers. Still, being a leader in any field can be a lonely and highly pressured place. Having an independent coach in an increasingly fragmented world will be of benefit to the individuals and their companies and to the British economy as a whole.
Jimmy McLoughlin has been an adviser to Theresa May and Boris Johnson and was in Downing Street from 2016-19
Philip Aldrick is away
📺 Stacey Dooley: Ready for War
I put this on without much expectation. However, I don’t think I have been moved by a TV programme as much since ‘It’s a Sin’.
It profiles the different Ukrainians who are in the UK being prepared for active service in the war against Russia by the British Army.
I was struck by the different jobs that people have from welders to florists who are retooling their lives and careers.
It is a powerful reminder of the war in Ukraine and the human sacrifice being made.
I want to vanquish the enemy, so that I can go back to tendering my garden
I text a friend in the British Army saying I had been moved and recommending it, with the caveat that he may find it a bit of busman’s holiday. His response
I found it moving too, and a reminder we haven’t updated our training in a century.
The two main questions I had left at the end were, why is this only on BBC Three and why is it just one episode?
🚜 Clarkson’s Farm
Everyone may be talking about Sucession as the business show of the year / decade. However, the challenges that Jeremy Clarkson has to go to expand a small business which could support 100 jobs in the local area is actually quite shocking.
We don’t focus enough on local government and planning challenges and how this impacts the growth of our economy. This is a a good expose as you are likely to see.
Almost half a million people are employed in agriculture in the UK. At Jimmy’s Jobs last year we did an audio essay on the Future of British Farming with the National Farmers Union, you can listen to that here.
If you are interested in partnering with Jimmy’s Jobs of the Future, you can check out our webpage here.
✍️ Substack Notes
During the week, I published my first note on Substack Notes, and would be keen for you to check it out.
It is a bit like Twitter but for substackers, so thoughts can be a bit shorter than an email.
I can imagine I would have found it quite useful during some of the leadership elections or crises like the CBI when things are moving faster.
Could be very interesting for next years General Election …
Substack blurb below:
Notes is a new space on Substack for us to share links, short posts, quotes, photos, and more. I plan to use it for things that don’t fit in the newsletter, like work-in-progress or quick questions.
How to join
Head to substack.com/notes or find the “Notes” tab in the Substack app. As a subscriber to Jimmy’s McLoughlin Notebook, you’ll automatically see my notes. Feel free to like, reply, or share them around!
You can also share notes of your own. I hope this becomes a space where every reader of Jimmy’s McLoughlin Notebook can share thoughts, ideas, and interesting quotes from the things we're reading on Substack and beyond.
☀️ Eliza Filby: Is the golden State losing its shine?
Great piece from
examining her trip to California and how the West Coast is struggling ...
🎭 That’s all folks!
Just a reminder you can watch the Michelle Donelan episode below and you can skip to exactly 32 mins to hear the spicy story that The Times picked up🌶️🌶️
Here’s another image to tempt you, thanks to Gareth Milner for writing in and providing the image which he took.
✍️ This notebook is not possible without …
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Glad you enjoyed Cryptoqueen and ABVC Jimmy!
Haha thanks - it was quite easy. I just searched my name haha