The one by Colin Lewis
On managing oneself
Friends,
I hope that all is well with you and yours, and that this e-mail finds you on a boat with shoddy connection, in the tropics, three months after I sent it.
In today’s newsletter, guest writer and retail media guru Colin Lewis discusses the need to manage oneself. For premium subscribers, he also provides some practical suggestions for how one might do it in practice.
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Every year for the last decade or so, I have created three main presentation decks. For 2025, however, I have (for the first time) added a fourth due to popular demand. They are:
What to Do When You Don’t Know What to Do: How to turn change into a competitive advantage. (Based on the new book by the same name.)
Leadership in a Time of Change: How to steer an organization through a sea of uncertainty. (Executive audiences only.)
Resilient Retail: How to build a profitable retail business in the modern marketplace. (Based on the 2025 follow-up to the highly praised 2022 white paper The Gravity of e-Commerce.)
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A couple of updates before we go-go
Well, here I am, firmly on the proverbial other side. On August 22nd, at 1.43am, our second daughter was born. To say that my wife was impressive was to put it exceedingly mildly indeed. What a star. What a fucking star.
To everyone who sent us their well wishes: thank you kindly. Both my wife and I appreciated it a lot.
Due to a slightly extended hospital stay - not to worry; all tests came back A++ - I had to delay Friday’s newsletter. Apologies for that, but I suspect that it is entirely understandable provided the circumstances.
Interesting coming back though, shall we say. We had all looked forward to the new siblings meeting for the first time (daughter #1 had been going on about her new sister all day, every day, for weeks), but once I picked the elder up at kindergarten, I noticed that she had a developed a cold. Which meant that I had to split the house into two quarantine zones: one upstairs for the wife and the newborn, and one downstairs for the rest of us.
The reason, for those who do not have children, is that kids do not develop the skill to properly breathe through their mouth until they are six months old. The reason is primarily to enable them to get food and oxygen at the same time, but it makes anything that blocks the airflow that much more of a hassle.
Anyway, enough of that. Let us move on to today’s guest writer.
JP’s note: Colin and I go back a fair few years. As far as I recall, we joined MarketingWeek as columnists at about the same time, connected, and instantly hit it off. In the years since, our friendship has grown over a mutual love of strategy, e-commerce, and racing. Today, Colin is arguably considered one of the top voices in retail media around.
The Need to Manage Oneself
Reflecting on a Revolution in Human Affairs
The most important task in your career is not that our output is effective, whether it is strategy, marketing or advertising. Instead, it is to understand how we can be effective. Forget what’s “out there” and work on what’s “in here”. Everything in your professional – and personal life - is downstream of how effective we personally are effective.
Don’t panic, this week is not a mini-self-help guide. The issue with self-help is that it is, as the wonderful Martin Weigel writes, habitually becomes “seeking certainty and answers in an uncertain world, there is it is fair to say, a near-infinite supply of confident advice, formula, and prophesy”
Rather, we will venture into what Peter Drucker called “Managing Oneself”. He wrote that “the challenges of managing oneself may seem obvious. The answers may appear self-evident to the point of appearing naïve”.
Perhaps the answers are self-evident to some, but they definitely were not to me, or to the many people who ask me for career advice. Indeed, reliable information on managing oneself or knowing how and when to change the work we do tends to be tainted by halo effects, opinions and selection bias.
But there are some models and material that I have found useful – if not perfect – and I think you will too.
A Word that Strikes Fear into My Heart: ‘Leadership’
A few years ago, I was referred to a small business that wanted some B2B marketing coaching. The business pitched itself as a “leadership coaching” business.
“Leadership coaching” are two words that should strike fear into any rational individual: a simple look at 80% of leaders around the world in politics and in business will show that the 100,000 or so books about leadership on Amazon are never read, or, more likely, just worthless. Indeed, as the general proprietor of this newsletter once wrote, there is lots of “Hallmark card level nonsense” to draw from in leadership texts.
This time – as the cliché goes - was different.
It turned out that although the company pitched itself as “leadership coaching”, they would have been better off saying that “we use research based, peer-reviewed, data driven tools based on years of adult development theory for you to manage yourself, your career and your future”. No, it does not exactly roll off the tongue. But there was something there.
As part of the onboarding process with the client, I had to get my head around adult development theory. As it turned out, there are several “schools”, each with their own frameworks, models and language, with a lot of consensus around the core ideas. These adult development schools of thinking are long established and robust from a research perspective, but many of the ideas and leading researchers are not widely known.
I found the parallels with the level of rigour that the likes of Professors Byron Sharp and Jenny Romaniuk brought to the marketing world relatively recently even though the research from the likes of Andrew Ehrenberg had been around for years interesting to say the least. And yes, there is lots of infighting and divided opinion in the world of adult development, just like in marketing.
However, the models are interesting to anyone who is trying to work out what to do next in their professional career, – whether working for someone else, for yourself – or simply trying to work out what to do. The key themes that I learnt were about stages of adult development, horizontal and development learning.
The Stages of Development
A Swiss psychologist, Jean Piaget showed in a series of experiments that as children grow, the way they think advances through predictable stages. Piaget found that at each higher stage, children could think in more complex and sophisticated ways and were able to deal with increasingly difficult problems.
What about adults? For a long time, it was assumed that once you reach adulthood, these stages of development stop. After all, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. Yet where Piaget left off in childhood, researchers like Robert Kegan and Bill Torbert picked up in adulthood. Kegan and Torbert pointed out that while a child’s development appears to happen automatically, adults cannot simply sit back and wait for things to happen – they need to work to keep growing.
Adult Development Theory points out that these are stages. Different researchers and adult development schools vary in the number of stages they identify. Some say seven, others have four - it does not really matter. The point is that we all go through stages or levels of development, but there is a snag: our stage of development influences what we notice or can become aware of, what we pay attention to, and act on.
The 2005 Harvard Business Review Article
While the idea of stages of development might appear to be obvious, I believe this is an interesting idea with wide-ranging implications that can really help us expand our scope of understanding, and, in turn, expand our potential for career success and satisfaction.
The 2005 Harvard Business Review article “Seven Transformations of Leadership”, written by David Rooke and William Torbert, is one of the most-read articles on leadership and has won awards for Best Published Research on Leadership and Corporate Governance. The article was backed by decades of field research, thousands of interviews, theory development, and organisational implementation.
The article takes the ideas around the stages of adult develop to describe seven different, successive leadership stages (called action-logics) that result in markedly different outcomes.
A TL:DR version of each stage recognised from the research are as follows:
Your stage of development greatly influences how you perceive your role, purpose, and value in both work and life, how you interact with others, and how you handle challenges and complexity. It also shapes how you define problems: whether they see them as technical issues with specific solutions or as adaptive challenges requiring personal growth and change.
In general, Rooke and Torbert found that people become more effective - over longer periods, in more complex environments, and in conditions requiring transformation - at the later stages (action-logics).
The achiever stage is often seen as the pinnacle of typical adult development. However, as Peter Bluckert writes:
“For those people who transition to individualist, this picture starts to look different. What used to give them the buzz doesn’t quite do it anymore. They can still perform the ‘outer game of business’ but it isn’t everything anymore. New questions and concerns are emerging in their ‘inner game’. Uncomfortable times can lie ahead as colleagues begin to pick up on their disquiet and question their commitment to the common purpose and collective core assumptions that succeeding is everything.”
Readers may be familiar with this disquiet. If you are not, you will be at some stage. In fact, more than one stage in your life. So, what’s the problem?
What got you out of Egypt won’t lead you to the Promised Land
A story might help here: for most of my career, I would say that I was in “Diplomat” or “Expert” level on the seven stages, dipping into “Achiever” depending on the role. Of course, my ego aspired to be a leader who might be an “Individualist” or more. The reality was that I was - and indeed arguably am - “stuck” at the “Expert” or “Achiever” level.
But as Strategic Coach founder Dan Sullivan says, what got us out of Egypt won’t lead us to the Promised Land: what made us successful to date will not get you where you want to go to. Executive coach Marshall Goldsmith writes about a related idea in the book What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, which discusses the habits of successful people that ultimately stymie them – “the excessive need to be me”. Most of us are trapped in a world of constantly fighting the last battle.
This stores up all sorts of problems. Maybe our career does not continue on the upward trajectory we imagined. Maybe we rub people up the wrong way – or just simply loose our way. Rooke and Tarbert would say that this means this not a fit between the individual’s stage of development and the career situation. Goldsmith would say we are attached to who we are.
So, if we want to move to the Promised Land - whatever we might perceive that to be; a new role, a new job, a promotion, a bigger client win - what truly is holding us back is a limitation in the current way we see the world.
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