Executive communication & pitch coaching for founders and leaders  

“Claude has emotions, and cheats when it feels desperate. The new model (Mythos) is so risky they’ve shut it down.” That’s what people are saying this week. It’s not really true. Let’s wind it back a bit. Claude doesn’t have emotions like humans do. What scientists are seeing are patterns inside the AI that look like things such as being careful, unsure, or trying harder when it keeps failing. But it shouldn’t be ignored either. Because something important is changing. These

I’m always paying attention to where communication breaks under pressure. It’s an acutely uncomfortable scenario.  A workshop facilitator was recently challenged on an inconsistency between what she was showing and what she was saying. She couldn’t explain it. The session collapsed. Someone then told his entire network on X about the whole thing.  She didn’t own her material. And that is a problem we’re seeing more and more of. I’ve started using AI more and more as a pitch p

Around us, something is shifting. Not collapse. But erosion. Public messages that were once reassuring are losing credibility as the context moves faster than the narrative. Leaders are repeating positions that no longer quite match reality. Organisations are moving carefully, delaying commitments. A kind of institutional freeze is setting in. Inside companies, the effect is tangible. Not chaos… but pressure. There is a heavy weight. Decisions delayed. Teams misaligned. Peopl

Recently I’ve been noticing something in my LinkedIn and X feeds. A steady stream of posts about collapse, disruption, uncertainty. The end of jobs, industries, and entire ways of working. AI confusion, wars, and scarcity. Morning coffee has never been so downbeat. ☕ Some of it reflects real changes in the world. I get that. We are living through a period of genuine transformation, and with that comes fear of the unknown. But the tone often feels different in a lot of these p

Many professionals still believe credibility comes from explaining more. More context More background. More slides. More words. I’ve seen this pattern again and again in meeting rooms throughout my career. We all know it kills our audiences but sometimes company culture or fear can override this.  Over the years, I’ve sat in on meetings in large institutions, including UN organisations, where the material was prepared for senior leaders, yet was so dense it struggled to separ

I live in Europe. Most of the AI tools I use every day come from the United States. They’re powerful. Fast. Incredibly useful. But something is becoming clearer. If you work with sensitive information—client strategy, internal discussions, early-stage ideas, confidential documents—at some point, you start asking a different question. Not “How good is the model?” But “Where is my data actually going?” For many use cases, cloud AI is perfectly fine. But for others, especially i

I’ve lived with impostor syndrome for most of my career. And to be honest, I still work on it. It was particularly acute at the beginning of my career. I could sit through a client meeting with a colleague and not utter a word. When I came back more confidently some years later, people struggled to remember me from those early days. Impostor syndrome isn’t just “doubting yourself.” It’s a pattern of self-interference. It shows up as invisible rules you impose on yourself: ∙ D

Early in my career, I started getting invited into rooms that were clearly above my pay grade. Bigger titles. Bigger stakes. People who decide very quickly. In the space of a year, I went from training mid-tier management to speaking in front of top leadership. It was terrifying. My instinct was predictable. Prepare more. Add more. Prove more. It backfired. In one meeting, a training session with a cohort of top leadership at Airbus Engineering in Brussels, I delivered somet

Most of the work I’m focusing on today lives in a narrow, uncomfortable space. It’s the space where decisions are made in public and reputations shift in minutes. Where a room quietly decides whether to trust you, fund you, follow you, or move on without you. And where, more often than we like to admit, there isn’t a second chance. I didn’t learn this from books. I learned it from experience. By watching good work fail because it was poorly prepared and poorly framed. Like a

In high-stakes conversations, you rarely get a second chance to be understood. We’ve all heard this a lot. “Just tell a story.” We’ve all heard the advice at some point. Just tell a story. Easy to say, difficult to execute. Most founders are too close to their project to know which story will land. They will often default to what feels meaningful to them, not what is meaningful to the audience. Without context, a story feels vague. Sometimes it feels engineered. How many time

We’ve all been there. Or close enough. I certainly have. Years ago, I delivered an online training for a UK-based company on material I could teach in my sleep. I had other priorities at the time and assumed that any misalignment with the audience, who were different from my usual clients, could be fixed live. I improvised. I also felt close to the source material. They wanted a training that blended public speaking with internal visibility. A topic I know well. Too well, as

Many of us think leadership progression is blocked by a lack of confidence. It’s a fair assumption. We associate good leaders with confidence and assertive decision-making. But I’m increasingly seeing that this is rarely the issue. The leaders who struggle are often calm, capable, respected, and trusted. They simply assume their value is obvious. The truth is, it isn’t. In my experience, organisations don’t promote potential. They promote readability . So what does that mean?

Photo of an anamorphic portrait of Václav Havel, the former Czech president, created by sculptor Patrik Proško in 2023 at Vàclav Havel airport, Prague. (Taken by me summer 2025). I don’t think I’ve written about a political speech since 2020. That’s about 5 years, according to my calendar. But today I feel compelled to, after listening to a powerful speech delivered by Mark Carney at Davos last Monday. The feelings it stirred weren’t ones of motivation or empowerment. If anyt

Most people think a good pitch means being perfect the first time. It doesn’t. I write this from firsthand experience. I have a stubborn defect around over-preparing. For years, the one thing I tried to do, and was sometimes encouraged to do, was to hit the mark at any cost on the first attempt. More often than not, this showed up as over-delivery. Too many frameworks, too much material and too little space. One example I can think of is when giving a short training session

A few days ago, Mike Novogratz (CEO of $GLXY) tweeted something that really landed with me. He said we might already be living in a world where truth itself feels unstable. You know, add AI-generated images, deepfakes, video manipulation, and the problem just accelerates. Look, he’s not wrong about the pressure we’re under. But I think the deeper issue isn’t that truth has disappeared. It’s that our capacity to judge calmly is being eroded. I mean, how many times have you wat

By 2026, the real leadership risk won’t be using  AI; nobody's stopping that train. The real risk will be outsourcing thinking to it . I say this as someone who actively works with AI every day. I love working with large language models. The strategies evolve constantly. It feels almost like a gold rush in innovation, learning, and entrepreneurial development. For months now, I’ve used them as brainstorming and sparring partners to: Explore ideas. Stress-test strategies. Remo

Most leadership communication problems today are not about clarity. They’re about competitive volume. We’ve started confusing loud communication  with clear communication . By Michael Rickwood Over the past months, my work on LinkedIn has sharpened something I was already sensing in the media and in leadership rooms long before social platforms made it obvious. There is a growing confusion between loud communication and clear communication. They are not the same. Loud communi

Leadership communication is not a luxury in the age of AI. It is the stabilising force that keeps organisations from drifting into confusion. By Michael Rickwood Something unsettling is happening inside companies in 2025. AI systems are being deployed everywhere, all at once. The promise is efficiency. The reality is disorder. I have not seen disruption at this scale before. The closest comparison is the arrival of the internet in the late 90s (when I was a student), when acc

In today's world, it's time to get curious. Most people treat curiosity as a soft skill. Something we encourage in children and dust off in brainstorming sessions. In my work with founders and executives, curiosity behaves differently. It is not gentle. It is a precision tool. Sometimes it is the only thing that cuts through the noise. And the excuses. When I coach, curiosity begins with a pressure test. Why now? Why this audience? Why should anyone care beyond the features?

The 7-step trust sequence for your pitch. Trust in business is hard currency. More important than talent. More important than trophies. And certainly more important than whatever “innovation theatre” many founders mistake for leadership. Research from Paul Zak’s neuroscience of trust reminds us that trust is not a soft concept. It literally alters brain chemistry. It changes how teams collaborate, how risk is perceived and how decisions get made. In leadership and investment,