The three Rs of leadership

As 9-5 morphs into 24/7, it brings mounting pressures and new rules. Your life is full-on, relentless and exhausting and worse still, it’s zipping by in a blur. It’s easy to end up careering from one crisis to another, buzzed up on sugar and coffee, existing from one holiday to the next.

The quickening pace applies to all aspects of life, but nowhere more so than the workplace. Too many emails, customers and back-to-back meetings.

The leader’s job is to squeeze more from less. You can’t work any harder. And if we tell you to work smarter, you’ll want to knee us in the groin. You’ve thought inside the box. Outside the box. You’ve even removed the box. So, where next?

You deserve a break. We believe leaders need to be challenged in an entertaining and humane way so enter, centre stage, Leadership: The Multiplier Effect, a rip-roaring tour through the essentials of leadership as it needs to be RIGHT NOW.

We’ve always been a bit jealous of educatio...

It's 2 May 1982 at Arsenal’s Highbury football stadium. More than 20,000 fans crowd into the North Bank terrace for the Arsenal vs West Ham United game. On one side is Renton Baker, aka ‘Chopper’, an infamous Arsenal football hooligan, on the other Simon Pinchbeck, aka ‘The Walrus’, a renowned Metropolitan Police officer.

The West Ham hooligans, known throughout the UK as the ICF, or Inter City Firm, had surrounded the Arsenal boys, known as The Herd. They had let off a huge red smoke bomb, and vicious fighting ensued across the terraces of the North Bank. The game was stopped as the crowd spilled onto the pitch. In the middle of the smoke, Renton was fighting against the ICF thugs, and Simon was fighting hard to separate both sets of fans, and bring order so that the game could take place. Outside the ground, a young Arsenal fan lost his life after he was stabbed to death.

Renton and Simon were sworn enemies – Renton and his hardcore hooligan mates trying to outfox the police, a...

While Daniel Craig’s recent turn as James Bond has ditched some of the more exuberant gadgetry in favour of stone-cold realism, the modern era of 007 arguably owes its success to Pierce Brosnan. Coming six years after Timothy Dalton’s regularly dismissed outings as the super-spy, Brosnan’s quadruplet of Bond films – starting with 1995’s GoldenEye and ending in 2004 with Die Another Day – kick-started the ‘new’ series of movies that continued throughout the turn of the millennium, as well the Drogheda-born actor’s career.

But while Bond fans can be thankful to Brosnan for handling the pressures of the role with aplomb, the star himself was even more grateful for the chance to establish himself at the forefront of the most famous franchise in film history. Four years prior to GoldenEye, he had lost his first wife, Cassandra, to ovarian cancer aged 43, and in the ensuing time Brosnan had been forced to juggle a career on-screen with his duty as a father to three: two stepchildren from ...

Gimme the money,” Pablo said to the building society cashier while he pointed the gun at her, wearing a balaclava.

Pablo was surprised when she answered him sarcastically, and he felt she was being deliberately slow while she put the money in the bag, so Pablo then pointed the gun at another cashier and told the sarcastic one that if she didn’t hurry up he would shoot her colleague.

Pablo didn’t enjoy doing armed robberies and says that they made him feel fearful. But he was driven to do them by his addiction to heroin, and he also sometimes took cannabis, methadone, speed, Valium, ecstasy and LSD.

He ended up getting arrested by the Flying Squad and was found guilty of six armed robberies, three attempted robberies and nine counts of possessing a firearm. The crimes were committed against building societies, post offices and shops. He was sentenced to a total of 67 years, though the sentences were to run concurrently, which meant he was serving a sentence of 12 year...

Professional magician Max Somerset is doing what he loves, but his journey hasn’t been conventional. Sorted magazine caught up with him to hear his journey of adoption, loss and faith.

What was your childhood like?

I grew up in the village of Bampton in Devon with my adopted parents, Mervyn Priddle, who was a milkman, and Shirley, who looked after the house of Edward and Molly Somerset, my biological grandparents. I had been brought to the West Country from Italy by my biological father, Ed Somerset junior, who found it difficult to deal with my Italian mother’s mental health issues and so they parted ways when I was two years old. Father left mother in Italy and took me to be with his ageing parents while he and two others set up a tiling design company in London called Fired Earth. Shirley had undergone a hysterectomy and therefore could have no children.

A twist of fate occurred a year later when my biological father contracted a brain tumour and it was mutually agreed that...

Facing his fast-approaching 70th birthday and retirement, John Sutcliffe wanted to do “something rather special” – and in his case, that meant planning a walk of more than 1,000 miles, to take him from the foot of the UK, at Cape Cornwall, to the top, at Cape Wrath. John comments: “As a lover of the outdoors, a long walk through Britain would fit the bill and help me reconnect with Britain and the British hills after a lifetime of working abroad.”

The idea, he says, came from a friend of his, who had read a book by someone who had done the same thing. But John was keen to avoid the usual route – Land’s End to John O’Groats, or vice versa. “I am a Far From the Madding Crowd sort of bloke which sort of rules out both Lands’ End and John O’Groats.” He believes that Cape Cornwall has far more to offer than Lands’ End: “It  is a lovely unspoilt spot conserved initially by H. J. Heinz,  who then bequeathed the land to the National Trust. The rugged Cape of gnarled and twisted ro...

The Spine Race is billed as one of the World’s toughest endurance events. It’s easy to see why, with a spectacular route up the Pennine Way, starting in Edale in the Peak District and finishing after 268 miles of boggy moorland and rocky mountaintops in Kirk Yetholm, just north of the Scottish border. The race is run non-stop with a time limit of seven days. Runners can sleep when and for as long as they want, but in the full knowledge that while they are doing this, the competition is hot-footing it towards Scotland and gaining crucial ground. This spectacular cocktail of extreme race distance and inevitable sleep deprivation pushes runners to their limit on some of the most challenging terrain the UK has to offer. The winter race, held in mid-January and often taking place through deep snow and sub-zero temperatures, has been running since 2012 and has achieved legendary status. In June 2018, I ran the newer summer event over the same course. In comparison with the fierce winter cond...

It had been nine years since I had been on mission,” explains 38-year-old Luke Gratton from Prestatyn in North Wales, “and I felt my world view had become limited; I believe you need to make sure every now and then that this is blown apart and that you are living in a bigger way.”

This is why Luke embraced training for a marathon across the Kenyan desert when his wife, Karen, who leads Alive Church in their home town, signed him up for an ‘adventure’. Karen had completed the Muskathlon Challenge in Rwanda in aid of Christian child development charity Compassion UK herself in 2017 and the family had since sponsored Nphibia.

The Muskathlon is an overseas adventure challenge hosted by 4M UK for Compassion UK, with participants choosing from a half, full or ultra-marathon, 120km cycle or 42km or 63km walk through the communities for which they are fundraising. The event encourages participants to find sponsors for children or raise funds to support local initiatives such as building ...