Your Party Leadership Lessons: When a Movement Forgets to Lead Itself
Your Party is a mess. Now, I met Jeremy Corbyn once, he was lovely, but there’s lessons to be learned from the UK’s newest political party, and politics isn’t important to learn it. The Guardian’s reporting on Your Party reads like a case study in how not to run a young organisation. Six MPs and […]
What McDonald’s Missed And How Your Business Can Learn From It
Been to McDonald’s recently? It’s expensive, poor quality, and a bad customer experience. But that’s just my opinion. An opinion I am really interested in is that of Robert Reich, a member of Bill Clinton’s cabinet and equality camaigner. Robert Reich’s critique of McDonald’s is not really about fast food. It is about what happens […]
How Underpin Helped Drive EDF’s £700m Commitment to Fish Protection at Hinkley Point C
In November 2025, EDF confirmed it would spend £700 million installing major fish protection systems at Hinkley Point C. This decisive shift did not appear overnight. It followed years of technical challenge, public scrutiny, expert testimony, and coordinated strategic influence. Underpin Consultants played a central role throughout this period: shaping the strategy, managing the narrative, […]
Lessons from Paul Heyman: Terrible Boss and ECW/WWE Wrestling Legend
Paul Heyman is one of the sharpest storytellers in modern entertainment. He can sell a feud, build a star, and turn chaos into theatre. But if you listen to him speak about his management style, a different picture emerges. The same instincts that made him brilliant as a performer would make him an appalling boss […]
The Pitfalls of Path Dependency: Why Past Choices Keep You Stuck
What is Path dependency? There’s a comforting myth about life: that the longer we’ve done something, the better, and more certain it must be. The process exists because it’s proven. The system endures because it works. The road ahead is simply an extension of the road behind. That’s path dependency, and it’s one of the […]
Lessons from Ferrari: Why hire Lewis Hamilton if you’re just going to tell him to shut up?
Ferrari has never been short on myth and legend. The scarlet cars, the tifosi, the weight of history. But the last few weeks have exposed something older than any championship drought: a culture that thinks all you need is Ferrari, hires world class talent and then tells them to shut up. When Ferrari chairman John […]
Value Yourself: Why Confidence, Not Compliance, Drives Collaboration
There’s a point early in every project where the tone is set. It happens quietly, often before any work begins. Someone walks into a meeting, opens their laptop, and begins to explain not what they do, but what they think the client wants to hear. From that moment, they start negotiating against themselves. It’s one […]
The Future of Social Value: Funding the Strategy, Not Just the Delivery
For all the talk about social value, almost no one funds the thinking behind it. Money is poured into projects, volunteering hours, and evidence reports, but not into the planning, mapping, and strategy that make social value actually work. It’s like paying to build the house but refusing to pay for the architect. As I […]
Beyond the Helicopter: Building Real Social Value Partnerships
Ask most charities what “bad social value” looks like, and you’ll get the same answer: the helicopter company. That’s the company that drops in for a day, paints a fence, takes a photo, uploads it to the portal, and flies off again. Everyone gets their evidence. No one gets any lasting benefit. As one charity […]
The Trouble with Measuring Trust
In Harvard Business Review, John Blakey argues that “leadership trust is a measurable, manageable business asset,” and that organisations must start treating it like any other strategic variable. It needs to be “visible, monitored, acted upon, and benchmarked.” It’s a logical idea. And on paper, it makes sense: if trust is so important, measure it. […]