Editor’s Letter – Spring 2026 Issue

I suspect that billions of dollars and a lot of Tuesday afternoons have gone into countless therapy sessions around the world to offer up the same great revelation. That a lot of people have unresolved father or mother or sometimes both issues. There’s probably a lot in it. We are probably to some extent walking around carrying somebody else’s unfinished business, dreams and aspirations thrust onto us by people who were themselves carrying somebody else’s, all the way back up the generational line to some dude who really wanted to take down the biggest wooly mammoth in the tribe but never got quite there, so he put a lot of transference pressure onto his offspring who secretly disappointed him because they just wanted to be cave painters and not hunters. I digress.

But this does lead me to Jacqlin Richards, whose book is called F*ck Up Your Kids with Grace & Humour. I like the title because not only does it stand out in an otherwise pastel parental help section but my read on it is that, look, chances are you are going to pass on some quirks to your kids but don’t stress. And this is a really key point. At the office, in our businesses, we get promotions and accolades if we are always kind of on edge, anticipating problems, putting out bush fires, go, go, go. But those things that make us great in the boardroom don’t make us great parents at the dinner table.

“We’ve been taught behaviour. Strategies. Consequences. Rewards. Sticker charts. But very few of us were taught that the greatest influence we have on our children isn’t what we say – it’s the state we bring into the room. Children borrow our nervous system long before they borrow our advice,” she writes in this issue.

One woman who I presume has made her parents extremely proud is Catherine Goodwin who took over the family real estate business her parents built, which meant deciding, one standard at a time, which parts of the inheritance to carry forward and which to challenge. She was 28 and building a legal career in England when she came home to be a property manager. “Most people, politely, said, have you lost your f**king mind?” When she started out, she took the hardest portfolio she could find so nobody could say she got the job because of nepotism. Two decades on, we interview her in what used to be her father’s office.

Bindi Norwell, meanwhile, decided early on what kind of boss she was never going to be, having worked for that kind in the years when you stayed at your desk until 11 at night to prove you were working. She now runs a healthcare network looking after 800,000 people with a team that will tell its own chief executive to slow down.

CTO, COO and now CEO, Jo Stansfield spent years hiding behind a curated professional persona, which is probably what most of us are doing really. But when she let it drop, she found her team did the same, on the theory that if she was brave enough to be her whole self, they might feel safe enough to be theirs. “If you’re the brightest person with the best degree, but you can’t interact as a human being, then it doesn’t really matter.” She has no degree, incidentally.

Samantha Stewart used to answer everybody. “At the start, I enjoyed giving solutions. I thought I was helping the team by giving answers immediately.” Now when someone brings her a problem, she asks them what they want to do, and has found that people usually already know but need the permission to say it out loud.

There is a common thread amongst our profiles in this issue. Some of the things that they thought made them successful are some of the things they eventually had to stop doing. Being the expert in the room, having the answer first, holding it all together. Go easy on yourself first. The rest of it follows… at work and at home.