Leadership Odysseys

Si Elliott has spent more than two decades in marketing leadership, and his conclusion is not what most of the industry wants to hear: businesses have become very good at reaching people, and increasingly poor at understanding them. As co-owner of Nottingham creative agency Diversity and founder of behavioural science consultancy Fabricx, Si has built his career at the intersection of human psychology and brand experience, watching the industry he loves chase metrics at the expense of the people those metrics are supposed to represent. His first book, Customer Experience Thinking, draws on 34 behavioural biases and 8 core customer experience principles to make the case that the future of leadership and marketing belongs to those who stop optimising for conversions and start designing for people. In this episode of Leadership Odysseys, Si traces the path that took him from an accidental start at a Nottingham agency to leading a management buyout, founding a consultancy, hosting his own podcast, and publishing a bestseller — all while watching his own daughters grow up in the digital world his industry helped build. Key Highlights The management buyout — and the choice he didn't have to make When the founders of Diversity stepped back, Si already held equity. He could have kept it. Instead, he structured a management buyout specifically to put shares in the hands of the people working inside the business. He's direct about why: "I could have sat and gone, 'I've got it all for me,' but I wanted to share the opportunity out to other people." That decision, he says, became the flywheel for everything that followed — and it tells you more about his leadership than any title ever could. The Kahneman lightbulb — discovering what had been happening beneath the surface all along It was Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow that cracked it open. Si describes the moment he understood that less than 5% of human decision-making happens in the conscious brain as a reckoning with his entire career: "All my career I've been playing to what I thought was everybody's 5% page, but there's so much happening beneath the surface." It didn't make the previous decades feel wasted. It made everything that came next feel urgent. The robot surgeon — where AI ends and humanity begins Si doesn't frame AI as the villain. He frames it as a power tool, and argues the industry's mistake is treating the tool as the carpenter. His robot surgeon analogy is worth sitting with: if you're under general anaesthetic, a statistically accurate robot is fine. The moment you come round, anxious and disoriented, what you need is a person who can see that you're panicking and put a hand on your shoulder. That distinction — between the moment that doesn't require connection and the moment that demands it — is where he believes every business needs to draw its own line. The effort heuristic — why his typo-filled LinkedIn posts outperform the polished ones Si uses his own feed to illustrate one of the behavioural biases at the heart of his book. A perfectly structured, three-point post signals AI. A post with his natural sentence structure and the odd typo signals a person who sat down and actually thought. People scroll past the first. They stop at the second. He puts it simply: sending a handwritten letter versus an email carries the same information, but a very different weight. In a world where AI removes the effort, effort itself becomes the differentiator. The daughters, the book, and why it had to be written Si has two daughters, 11 and 14, growing up inside the world that his industry helped build. He was honest about what he saw: "Is this as good as the world I entered into? And in a lot of cases, I don't feel it is." The book wasn't a career play. It was a response to watching what metric-driven, digital-first marketing has done to genuine human connection — and a decision to do his part in pulling it back. For every copy sold, he plants a tree. Not because it scales. Because it has to live up to what the book is actually asking of people. Si's words of wisdom to close: the pursuit of getting the thing is what you will enjoy most — not the having of it. For someone who spent two decades building something real, shared equity he could have kept, wrote a book he wasn't sure he had the right to write, and planted trees for every copy sold, that's not a polished closing line. It's what the whole conversation was actually about. Si Elliott is proof that the most interesting paths are rarely the ones you planned — and that the willingness to stay curious, stay human, and share the upside with the people around you is what makes a career worth looking back on. Connect with Si Elliot: LinkedIn  Fabricx: LinkedIn | Website  This episode is brought to you by: Cell Wellness Co | Naturally Glutenfree Connect with Kirsty Ghahramani (Gee):  LinkedIn |  Instagram | Website

Nine months to learn a new language. Eighteen months of knocking on doors before anyone called back. Twenty years building a business with the same business partner, without ever needing to be seen doing it. Ash Ghahramani didn’t learn discipline from a book.  Ash Ghahramani is the co-founder and managing director of Naturally Gluten Free, one of Australia’s first purpose-built, HACCP-approved gluten-free manufacturing facilities. He arrived in Australia at eleven, having spent his early years in Iran, with almost no English. He is also my husband: 21 years married, 7 before that, which means recording this one meant asking questions I’ve never had to ask out loud in 28 years of knowing the answers. Finding the right partner in life is the most important decision you’ll ever make. I made mine at seventeen, and I’d make it again. The Highlights A new language in nine months.  Ash arrived in Australia having lived through war as a child, knowing little more than hello and thank you. Nine months in an intensive language centre later, he walked into mainstream high school able to read, write and hold his own. The curriculum he’d already survived in Iran had quietly prepared him to finish a year ahead. The job that rerouted everything.  University was never a question in a family of academics, until a job at McDonald’s at fifteen answered one Ash hadn’t known he was asking. He didn’t fall for the job. He fell for the people, and for the particular satisfaction of running something well. Every business he’s built since is an extension of that first instinct. One sentence. One decision. Twenty years.  Retailers laughed when Ash said his bread needed refrigeration. Looking for the science to back the decision, he found one sentence: the most common bakery preservative is also used to disinfect hospital equipment. He closed the browser. No preservatives, ever. He’s never reopened that question since. Walking away from Coles.  Every small food brand wants the call from a major supermarket. Ash and his business partner got it, then walked away, refusing to absorb the rebates and shrinking margins the deal demanded. The retreat became the turn. Food service relationships with chefs that, in some cases, have now outlasted entire restaurant careers. What success actually means.  Not the house. Not the car. Walking down the road for a coffee on his own time. A holiday that doesn’t have to be big to count. Being present for the people he loves, rather than just providing for them. The legacy that isn’t the business.  Ask Ash what he’s most proud of after two decades of building a company from nothing, and the answer isn’t the factory, the contracts, or the twenty-year partnership. It’s two kids he calls his legacy. ~~~ In His Own Words “We will never use preservatives. We’ll just have to work on the mindset that it’s okay to keep real bread in the fridge, because that’s how it was made a hundred years ago.” “Finding the right partner in life and raising two beautiful kids that are going to be our legacy, that’s probably the biggest thing I’m proud of.” ~~~ I have had the front-row seat to all of this for over twenty years. The early mornings. The long days. The pressure he carried without needing to say it out loud. The business was never a means to an end for him. It’s the thing he and his team built with their own hands, to a standard he’d feed his own kids. That care is exactly why it lasts, and exactly why it was never separate from the rest of what we built together. He’ll tell you the proudest thing he’s built is us. I believe him. Connect with Ash: LinkedIn Connect with Naturally Glutenfree: LinkedIn | Website  This episode is brought to you by: Cell Wellness Co | Naturally Glutenfree Connect with Kirsty Ghahramani (Gee):  LinkedIn |  Instagram | Website

A career without a plan can still take you somewhere remarkable. Meg Bonighton walked into an ANZ call centre at twenty-something looking for nine-to-two work so she could finish her university degree. Sixteen years later she was still there, having led the relaunch of internet banking, built a direct banking brand through a global financial crisis, and closed that same brand with every customer and every team member placed safely on the other side. Then she left. Then she proved herself again at NAB, then Telstra, then the Commonwealth Bank. Now she is doing something that has required its own kind of courage: building something with only her own name on it. This conversation is about what it actually takes to say yes before you feel ready, lead through the moments that test everything, and know when it is time to pack up the kit bag and start again. The Guest Meg Bonighton spent more than two decades in senior executive roles across ANZ, NAB, Telstra and the Commonwealth Bank, working across governance, risk, digital transformation and customer strategy in some of the most complex and scrutinised environments in Australian business. She has led thousands of people through a global financial crisis and a pandemic, sat on boards through both, and built a reputation for creating teams that outlast the moment that made them. She is now stepping into her third arc as a non-executive director and advisor, and starting to give back what a career of saying yes has given her. Highlights The Nine-to-Two Job That Changed Everything. Meg took a part-time call centre role at ANZ to balance finishing her degree. It was meant to last a semester. On a Friday afternoon a few years in, a manager told her he had something for her on Monday and that she was going to say no, but she shouldn't. She spent the entire weekend anxious. The project was the relaunch of ANZ's internet banking. She said yes. That habit of saying yes to the things that felt too big became the thread that ran through everything that followed. When Someone Sees You Before You See Yourself. A recurring theme across Meg's career is leaders who backed her before she had backed herself. Her answer to imposter syndrome, when a senior leader told her she was offended by the very concept, reframes what self-doubt actually means: the organisation has done its due diligence. You were chosen. Get on with it. It is advice she has passed on to every person she has led since. The Day She Closed the Brand She Built. After leading a direct banking brand through the global financial crisis, Meg had to stand up in front of her team and tell them it was closing. She had not slept. She braced for questions about jobs. The first question she received was about the customers. She nearly burst into tears. Every team member was placed before she left. That moment, she says, is the clearest measure of the culture a leader actually builds. Leading Thousands Through a Pandemic, Across Three Countries, From Two States. At Telstra, Meg ran global contact centres across three countries while simultaneously sitting on the TelstraSuper board during a period of unprecedented member withdrawals, homeschooling her children in Melbourne, and sharing childcare with her partner in Sydney. She describes it as peak hat. What she took from it was clarity: that crisis strips away everything except what actually matters, and that is where people find out who they are as leaders. The Third Arc. After two decades of building inside other people's organisations, Meg is now building inside her own. She calls this her third arc, and it is not a wind-down. It is the deliberate choice to take every wicked problem, every lesson, every team she has ever led, and put it to work differently. She is learning Italian badly and relearning tennis from scratch. Both, she says, are teaching her something she keeps needing to remember: that humility is not weakness. It is the fastest way to learn. Quotes "I stood up in front of the team and told them the brand was closing. I was expecting the first question to be about jobs. Instead it was, what happens to our customers? I nearly burst into tears. That was the power of what we had built." "Say yes to something that is going to build out your kit bag, and all the more so if it is coming from someone or somewhere you trust. It is another way of feeling the fear and doing it anyway. You will create a beautiful story for yourself along the way." Reflection The kit bag is a simple idea. Every yes adds something you carry forward. Every hard season, every role that tested you, every team you had to lead through something nobody prepared you for. Meg has been packing hers for more than twenty years. Listening to this conversation, I found myself thinking about my own. What is in it. What I almost left behind. And what I am still building the courage to add.   Connect with Meg Bonighton: LinkedIn  This episode is brought to you by: Cell Wellness Co | Naturally Glutenfree Connect with Kirsty Ghahramani (Gee):  LinkedIn |  Instagram | Website

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that does not show up on a performance review. It is the exhaustion of being excellent at your job while quietly disappearing inside your own life. Megan Dalla-Camina knows that exhaustion intimately. She built an 18-year career at the highest levels of corporate leadership while doing everything else too -- and it took a phone call to her mother, sitting in a car park outside her office, for her to finally say the thing out loud. The Guest Megan Dalla-Camina spent nearly two decades inside GE, PwC, and IBM, rising to Head of Strategy for a multi-billion-dollar division before walking away to build something entirely her own. Today she is the Founder and CEO of Women Rising, a global leadership movement that has supported more than 10,000 women across 70 countries, a bestselling author, and a PhD researcher in women's spirituality and feminine wisdom. Highlights The car park moment. Megan describes the exact moment her corporate career ended -- not in a boardroom, but on a phone call to her mother from outside her office, expecting reassurance and instead hearing the truth: "Of course you can't. You have no life." Minutes later she walked into her CEO's office and said three words she had never said before: I am done. Build it, don't wait for it.  Megan's reframe on purpose is one of the most useful things you will hear this year. Most of us wait to find purpose, as though it will arrive fully formed. Megan's research and her own life say otherwise -- purpose is built one breadcrumb at a time, picked up without needing to know where the path leads. The paradoxes women are asked to live inside.  From the leadership paradox to the motherhood paradox, Megan unpacks the quiet, contradictory rules so many women have absorbed without ever naming them -- and why naming them is the first act of stepping outside them. Returning, not arriving.  Megan's newest book, She Who Remembers, is built on a single idea: the wisdom you are looking for outside yourself was never missing. It was always there. The work is not acquiring it. The work is remembering it. A rupture is not a failure.  Burnout, grief, an unraveling -- Megan reframes these not as breakdowns but as invitations. The moments that feel like falling apart are often the moments something true is finally being heard. From the Conversation "It's working externally, but it's not working internally. It's working for everybody else. Not for you." "Every no is a yes. If it's a no to this, it's creating space for it to be a yes to something else." Where This Leaves You If you have ever felt the gap between a life that looks right on paper and a life that feels true, this conversation will meet you there. Megan's invitation is not to blow anything up. It is to pick up the next breadcrumb, however small, and pay attention to where it leads. Connect with Megan Dalla-Camina: LinkedIn | Website  This episode is brought to you by: Naturally Glutenfree Connect with Kirsty Ghahramani (Gee):  LinkedIn |  Instagram | Website

There is a version of every life that almost happened. The path we were on before we turned, suddenly, toward something we couldn't yet see. Most of us never talk about that fork in the road, or what it cost to walk away from the safe thing. This conversation is about exactly that moment, and what unfolds when you trust it completely. Mike Erlin is the co-founder and CEO of AbilityMap, a company built to answer a question that followed him across three countries and twenty years: why do organisations keep getting it wrong on people, and why does nobody seem able to fix it? Before any of that, he was a footballer at the University of Oregon, a stranger on a yacht club dock in San Francisco, and a young man standing at a literal crossroads in Salt Lake City. Highlights The paper route that funded a household. When Mike's parents divorced in 1975, his mother was left with two boys and no income. At nine years old, Mike was lending her money from his paper route savings — the first lesson in a belief that would define his life: there is no option but to move forward. Two worlds in one childhood. After the divorce, Mike's mother packed her sons into a Datsun station wagon and drove them to Guanajuato, Mexico, for eighteen months. He lived in a wealthy compound but crossed daily into a poorer part of town to play with friends who had dirt floors — an early, formative lesson in seeing people for who they are, not what they have. The decision at the crossroads. Mid-route delivering a boat part to Salt Lake City, Mike faced a literal fork: turn one way back to his football team at Oregon, or the other way toward an America's Cup campaign in Australia. He turned toward the unknown — and has carried the guilt of leaving his team behind for years since, even knowing it changed the entire direction of his life. The full circle nobody could have planned. Mike's America's Cup campaign brought him to Australia, where he met his wife. Decades later, he discovered that the same psychometric science used to help Australia win the Cup in 1983 had been pioneered by the man who would become his AbilityMap co-founder — a connection neither of them saw coming until it was already true. Building lean, on purpose. AbilityMap ran for four years without sending a single invoice while Mike and his co-founder tested the science. They've taken minimal outside funding, survived a fifty percent revenue drop during COVID, and twenty-one months without income — choosing to do the job right over doing it fast. Anchor Quotes "There wasn't some huge spreadsheet that I used to weigh everything. I think I just looked at it and I felt what was going to be — I tend to do this, and it's definitely not always right." "AI amplifies that which we have. If we have people who are misaligned from a capability standpoint, it's going to amplify that misalignment." What stays with me from this conversation is how rarely the biggest decisions in our lives come with certainty attached. Mike didn't have a spreadsheet at that crossroads, he had a feeling, and the willingness to live with what it cost. If you're sitting at your own fork in the road right now, I hope this conversation reminds you that clarity often comes after the turn, not before it. Connect with Mike Erlin: LinkedIn  Connect with Ability Map: LinkedIn | Website  Connect with Kirsty Ghahramani (Gee):  LinkedIn |  Instagram | Website