Thirty years.Ten bets I'd make again.

Begin with the end in mind.

If you don't know what success looks like, you're navigating without a destination. This sounds obvious. It isn't practiced nearly enough. The clearest thing I can do as a leader - or as a board member - is define what we're actually trying to build, and make sure everyone in the room is looking at the same picture.

When I bought NCC, I had a vision of what it could be. That vision was the compass through twelve years of noise.

Hope is an underrated virtue.

You'll hear "hope is not a strategy." Fair enough. But hope is the predecessor to belief, and belief is where strategy begins. I've never seen a great company built without it. The leaders who stripped hope out of their vocabulary in favor of pure analytical rigor tended to build precise, efficient, uninspiring organizations.

Every one of my biggest bets - NCC, the ESOP, Flexmove Americas - started with hope long before it started with a spreadsheet.

Find the good. Live there.

There is always good and bad in a company, a team, a market. What you choose to focus on is not just a mindset - it's a leadership decision with downstream consequences. Teams that spend most of their energy on what's broken tend to stay broken. Teams that anchor on what's working, and build from it, move faster and pull harder.

I told my team this directly, many times: what you focus on determines the quality of what you build.

The customer is the north star.

Not a slogan. An operating principle. Every strategic question eventually comes back to it - what does the customer actually need, what are we delivering, and is the whole organization oriented around that answer? I've watched companies drift into internal politics, margin games, and process debates and completely lose the thread. The customer pulls you back.

We built a category-leading position in the ophthalmic industry because we asked what customers couldn't get elsewhere - and then built exactly that.

People buy in to what they help create.

Directives get compliance. Involvement gets ownership. This is the principle behind the ESOP - but it showed up long before the ESOP, in how we ran meetings, set strategy, and made decisions. The more people felt that their fingerprints were on the outcome, the harder they worked to protect it.

The ESOP didn't create our ownership culture. It formalized one that already existed - because we'd been practicing this for years.

Assume best intent.

Early in my career I was a chronic blame-finder. When something went wrong, I went looking for who dropped the ball and why. It was exhausting, it was corrosive, and it was almost always wrong - people were usually doing their best with what they had. One conversation from a great manager changed that. The shift from blame to curiosity is one of the highest-leverage moves a leader can make.

I haven't written a punishing email in twenty years. That one change bought me more goodwill and better information than almost anything else I did.

Business is personal. Always.

The phrase "it's not personal, it's business" is usually code for avoiding accountability. Business is made of people. People remember how they were treated - especially when things got hard. The leaders who try to compartmentalize the human side don't protect themselves from the consequences of hard decisions. They just make worse ones.

Every number on a financial statement is a story about a person. I never forgot that - and neither did my team.

Ask more than you answer.

The best leaders I've known are not the ones with the most answers - they're the ones who ask the best questions. Curiosity earns trust. It surfaces the real problem, not the stated one. And it signals to the people in the room that their knowledge matters. I learned this the hard way by being the guy who always had the answer - and consistently missing what was actually going on.

We almost sank a product launch because we assumed we knew what customers would pay. We didn't ask. Curiosity is cheaper than failure.

Be concise.

The more words, the less effect. This applies to emails, presentations, strategies, and feedback. If you can't say it clearly and briefly, you haven't finished thinking it through. Clarity is a form of respect - for the listener's time and for the idea itself. I've seen more decisions stall because of murky communication than because of murky strategy.

I wrote a poem about this once. It was short.

Set people up. Own it when it goes wrong.

Before you conclude that someone failed, ask whether they were set up to succeed. Did they have the right tools, the right information, the right support? Were expectations clear? Most underperformance is a systems problem dressed up as a people problem. And when it does go wrong - at the board level, at the leadership level, anywhere - the fastest way to rebuild trust is to own it cleanly and without deflection.

I gave three last chance letters in my career. Two worked. One didn't. In every case, I asked myself first - did I do everything I could to set this person up?