Last Christmas a friend of mine gave me a notebook which was titled Notes From Another Meeting That Should Have Been An Email.

The friend obviously knows me well. Over a long and successful career, I’ve developed a healthy and quite vocal dislike and mistrust of meetings that I’m invited to at work.

That’s not because I’m unwilling to be part of an information-sharing process. Anyone who’s a regular reader of these blogs will know, for example, that I’m a big advocate of ensuring communication is regular, open and transparent.

At some point in our careers, most of us will have been on one side or the other of a difficult work conversation.

Confrontation is never easy, no matter how gentle, how constructive, or how well-intentioned it may be. No one likes to be criticised or to be told they’re performing or behaving in a way that is anything less that constructive or positive.

For most of us, those conversations might just be the slightly awkward variety that are part and parcel of being young and making mistakes as we take our first steps up the career ladder.

Since the pandemic we’ve seen the workplace and workplace culture change in significant – and almost certainly permanent ways.

Perhaps the biggest change has been the fact that hybrid working has become the norm. Where flexible working used to be something that involved a formal request and, in many cases, a contract amendment, working from home is now part of the normal landscape.

But another area that has seen huge change is in the globalisation of companies and their workplaces.

One of the biggest sunk costs to businesses is in recruiting the wrong person to a role.

That isn’t just about what it costs to advertise, interview and onboard a candidate. It also relates to the time it takes for you as a business leader or senior manager to go through the long- and short-listing process, the cost severing ties when it doesn’t work out, and the cost of re-advertising the role and repeating the recruitment process.

Warning: this blog contains spoilers relating to Season 4 of Succession

Sky Atlantic’s Succession is one of TV’s biggest and most talked about hits in a decade. Not since Breaking Bad closed its door in 2013 has a show gripped the imagination of audiences around the world.

The show can need little introduction for most TV connoisseurs, but if you did happen to miss all four seasons but plan to catch up with it, you might want to look away now. For everyone else, as long as you’ve finished S4 you can read on safely.