About the Author

Colin spent the first forty years of his career doing something remarkably logical: building a life around computers, electronics, and the comforting certainty that if you asked a machine the right question, it gave you the right answer. Then, in a plot twist even he didn't see coming, he spent the next twenty years discovering that people rarely work that way at all — sixty years of experience in total, and, by his own admission, still learning.

His path ran from Computer Engineer to Principal Engineer, through Manufacturing Engineering Manager and Manufacturing Manager, up to Director and eventually General Manager and Managing Director, in the UK, Ireland and the USA. Along the way he travelled a great deal for business, worked closely with a wide range of cultures, and slowly swapped the certainties of circuit diagrams for the messier, more interesting art of leading people. He became, by most accounts, a calming influence and an empathetic coach and mentor to senior executives across both private and public sectors — an outcome nobody who knew him as a young engineer could have predicted with any confidence.

Never one to let a career be simple, Colin topped it all off with a stack of qualifications earned the hard way: studies in digital and analogue computers, mathematics, logic and electronics, followed by an MSc in Management Practice, an MSc in Occupational Psychology, and a PhD in Business Administration. All of this was completed by distance learning, squeezed in around a demanding job and the rather more important task of raising two fine sons.

More recently, Colin has turned his hand to children's books, written in happy collaboration with his brother (RIP), sister and niece — proof that the appetite for a good story runs in the family.

It is perhaps fitting, and not a little ironic, that a man trained to think in circuits and systems should end up writing a book about leadership drawn from art, music, sport and science. A later assessment of his own leadership style confirmed as much: equal parts structured organiser and restless innovator, with a lifelong appetite for learning that shows no sign of slowing. Proof, as this book argues, that the best insights often come from the places we least expect them — even from an engineer who spent forty years believing every problem had a right answer.