Leadership, Rewritten Podcast

Leadership, Rewritten

The playbook is broken. I write about what comes next for leaders navigating complexity and collapse. richardclaydon.substack.com

Episodes

  1. 10/25/2025

    EE08: Listening to Flexibility

    If you’ve been following the last two essays — The Ordinary Rhythms That Build Extraordinary Adaptability and How Real Change Travels — you’ll know we’ve spent the past few weeks in the Leadership Gym, exploring how adaptability is less about mindset and more about rhythm. Six rituals, one system: Clarity. Coherence. Collaboration. Cooperation. Curiosity. Connection. Each small, practical, repeatable. Each a muscle for flexibility — not the performative kind that leadership culture loves to sell, but the lived kind that keeps a team from snapping under pressure. For those who prefer to listen rather than read, I’ve now gathered all the content on Flexibility Rituals — stories, gym analogies, and reflections — into a single episode of the NotebookLLM podcast. It’s designed as an accessible, continuous narrative. A note on format: this episode was AI-generated, built directly from the text you’ve been reading. The synthesis, structure, and tone are mine; the voice is machine.If synthetic narration isn’t your thing, feel free to skip it — the written essays hold everything you need. But if you’re curious to hear how language and rhythm land aloud — how these rituals sound when spoken as a single flow — you might find the listening unexpectedly grounding. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit richardclaydon.substack.com

    15 min
  2. 10/05/2025

    E07: Beyond Toughness

    This episode is a little different. It isn’t one of the shorter essays you’ve been reading here — it’s a full, AI-narrated version of Chapter Five: Endurance Training – Holding the Thresholds of Leadership from the latest draft of Leadership, Rewritten. That means it draws from an updated manuscript, one that goes deeper than the essays I’ve shared on Substack so far. If you’ve been following those pieces — The Stretch That Wouldn’t Snap Back, Naming the Thresholds, Endurance Is Not Stoicism — this is where they all come together. Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to keep up with Maya’s journey. The audio covers the complete chapter: * the story of Maya and her team, learning to recognise the five Thresholds of Leadership — Stretch, Tangle, Drift, Break, and Leap; * the practice routines that help leaders recover and adapt rather than collapse; * and the research anchors linking endurance to stress science, resilience theory, and complexity thinking. A short summary: The chapter argues that endurance in leadership is not about toughness or grit, but about rhythm — the ability to move between tension and recovery. By naming thresholds instead of pathologising them, teams shift from blame to adaptation, creating collective resilience and cultural trust. A note of transparency — this narration is AI-generated. The voice isn’t trying to imitate a human reading; it’s there to make the full draft accessible in another form. Some people find synthetic voices off-putting, and that’s perfectly fine — you can always stay with the written versions here. But if you’re curious to hear how the complete Thresholds framework sounds when spoken aloud, this audio episode is the closest thing to sitting beside the manuscript itself. Thank you, as always, for listening, reading, and helping this work evolve. — Richard This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit richardclaydon.substack.com

    18 min
  3. 09/14/2025

    E06: Designing for Development

    Welcome to episode six of the Leadership, Rewritten podcast. What you’re about to hear is an AI-generated narration of the full text of Chapter Six: Designing for Development. This chapter is longer and more detailed than the Substack essays you may already have read. It tells the full story of Maya’s turning point: how she discovered that leadership development doesn’t need to be bolted onto the side of work — it can be embedded inside the work itself. You’ll hear about: * The napkin moment that gave rise to the Praxis Q quadrants. * Maya’s creation of Self-in-Role-in-System briefs — developmental job descriptions that act as mirrors rather than blueprints. * The four developmental arcs of Jo, Anil, Priya, and Kieran, each stretching into a different Praxis Q quadrant. * The emergence of the Praxis Q Growth Cycle — one quadrant, one stretch posture, one deliverable, one ripple. Please note: this is an AI-generated podcast, created directly from the full written chapter. It’s an experiment in making the complete text more accessible in audio form, and the tone is different from a live conversation. If you’d prefer something more human and dialogic, stay tuned: in the next two weeks I’ll be releasing the first non-AI podcast — an interview with Becky Andree, exploring the practice of High-Quality Connections and how they shape developmental leadership. For now, settle in. This chapter is where Maya begins to build a team designed not just for delivery, but for development.Sorry for the day’s delay. Lots of technical chalalnges getting this converted and processed to somethign Substack would work with. Hope you enjoy it. Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to keep up with Maya’s journey. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit richardclaydon.substack.com

    19 min
  4. 08/31/2025

    E05: Simple Rules for a Complex World

    This episode explores Chapter Five of Leadership, Rewritten in full — a piece that is two to three times longer than the paired Substack essays. Where the essays focus on the first two rules (for the self and the role) and then the next three (for the team and the system), this podcast weaves them together as one continuous arc. You’ll hear Maya’s journey in context — from her frustration at being able to “see complexity” but not shift it, through her discovery of five simple rules that gave her and her team a shared grammar: * Develop the self who can evolve the role * Work on one thing to improve all things * Calibrate for the level. Anticipate the next * Anchor what matters. Repeat what you want to remember * Read the system. Don’t just ride it Together, these rules offer a livable, repeatable way to practice leadership when clarity alone is not enough. ⚠️ Note: This is an AI-generated podcast. The narration is synthetic, which means it won’t sound like a human audiobook. I want you to know that upfront, so you can decide whether to listen to the audio version or engage with the essays instead. If you want to skip it and wait for the written content, then the first Chapter Six essay, focusing on how Maya begins to redesign her team’s practices to help them simultaneously deliver and develop, drops on Wednesday. Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to keep up with Maya’s development. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit richardclaydon.substack.com

    33 min
  5. 08/13/2025

    E04: Leading in Complexity

    Systems. Maps. Movement. Entanglement. Three essays. One arc. A turning point. This episode brings together the last three Maya Essays: * From Self to System – how to read the conditions, not just your reactions. * No Map. Just Movement – what to do when visibility drops. * The Entangled Self – a grounded alternative to the myth of the transcendent leader. It also includes insights about how to effectively play the leadership role when you are * Leading as Sense-Making – what leadership becomes when the way ahead is uncharted and the conditions are murky but the work must continue (the conditions of sense-making section of the podcast). Together, they mark the end of Maya’s Disillusionment Arc, not because the system is fixed, but because she’s no longer waiting for it to make sense. She’s starting to build something else: A leadership practice rooted in self-in-role-in-system. Not heroic. Not clean. But aware. Reflective. Capable of naming the tangle without becoming it. This podcast holds that inflection point when clarity is still partial, but a new compass is forming. If you’ve been walking this path alongside Maya, this is the pivot. I haven’t yet written about the role. I’ve decided to try releaseing it as a diagnostic tool to help you explore your own sense-making stance — across self, role, and system. That’s for the weekend. Note: This podcast is AI-generated from the full Chapter Four — not just the public essays. That means it goes deeper, and at times, more internal. If AI narration bothers you, you won’t hurt anyone by skipping this one. But if you’re willing to listen past the synthetic voice, there’s something real waiting underneath. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit richardclaydon.substack.com

    32 min
  6. 07/13/2025

    E01a: Bonus Podcast - “Stretched to Breaking Point” Reworked

    If you’ve already read Chapter One, you may think you know this story.But this version, revised to match the depth, tone, and narrative rhythm of the rest of the book, lands differently. This bonus podcast reflects the reworked Chapter One: a deeper, sharper, more honest rendering of Maya’s threshold moment. It was the chapter that started it all and it deserved to be rewritten once the full shape of the book emerged. In this episode, you’ll hear Maya’s quiet reckoning as she sits through three ordinary meetings that leave an extraordinary mark. What unfolds is not burnout, not collapse, but a systemic stretch—one that reveals how much leadership has become an act of absorption: of contradiction, incoherence, and moral friction. Inside the episode: * The slow erosion of clarity in roles that demand performance over presence * The mismatch between leadership language and lived reality * The invisible toll of holding systems together without structural support * And the moment Maya stops pretending it’s all working and begins to name what no longer makes sense This is the threshold most leadership books skip. But here, we begin with it—because most transformation doesn’t start with vision. It starts with disillusionment that dares to tell the truth. ⚠️ Please note: This episode, like all others in this series, was generated using AI—grounded in my writing and direction but delivered through synthetic narration. That said, the story is no less real. Because Maya’s experience is not just hers. It’s quietly being lived by thousands of leaders—still functioning, but no longer asleep. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit richardclaydon.substack.com

    21 min

About

The playbook is broken. I write about what comes next for leaders navigating complexity and collapse. richardclaydon.substack.com