Writing
Opinionated, practical and free.
Essays on behaviour change, leadership, research culture and sport, drawn from 26 years of doing the work.
Latest essays
- Can preprints protect IP?
With academic funding being cut, I explore whether preprints can help researchers keep the rights they need to commercialise their work.
- Why open science is not going away
Covid-19 opened the world's eyes to the need for open science. The genie is out of the bottle, and here's why I don't believe it's going back in.
- How to become innovative: a short and self-indulgent post
What a childhood spent on market stalls and at late-night auctions taught me about innovation: adapt or die.
- Two and a half low-cost solutions to the open access publishing problem
How researchers ended up giving away their work and buying it back, and two and a half low-cost ways existing technology could help fix academic publishing.
From the archive
Earlier essays, first published on Medium.
- The nine key behaviours I learned from 10+ years studying leadership
Good leadership is a small set of other-focused, authentic behaviours, not charisma or a toolkit.
- From 50 million dollar contract to mental hospital
The story of Brandon Marshall: even the most successful athletes can be in crisis, and asking for help is strength.
- How gaming can be good (and bad) for your mental health
A personal account of gaming, loss and what games can do for our basic psychological needs.
- My career as a football coach, and how to do better
A letter to the next generation of sports coaches: get mentors, keep your options open, and look after yourself.
- Why I hate workload models
When a system invites gaming, people game it. What university workload models teach us about incentives.
- How to manage a football team: 20 tips for new managers
The post read more than 20,000 times that became the First-Time Sports Coach book.
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