​Scene and Context

Many organisations are busy without being effective. Projects multiply, initiatives overlap, and leaders spend increasing time maintaining activity rather than assessing whether it still serves a clear aim. The result is rarely failure. More often, it is a slow dilution of attention.

John describes this as a leadership problem rather than a structural one. In his view, organisations now operate in conditions that reward visibility and speed over judgment.

Quarterly cycles, constant commentary, and social media noise all push leaders toward doing more, not deciding better.

What suffers is focus. Projects continue not because they work, but because stopping them feels harder than starting something new.

Early discipline and formation

John’s understanding of leadership did not come from business school. He grew up in rural Shropshire, entered work through retail banking, and then chose to become an infantry officer. For ten years, he served in the army, operating in situations where decisions had immediate consequences for others.

That experience shaped his view of responsibility.

Leadership, he learned, was not about visibility or personal advancement, but about making clear decisions under pressure and being accountable for their outcomes.

Those lessons stayed with him as he moved into work at the intersection of business, government, and civil society, including a decade working with the then Prince of Wales, now King Charles III, on programmes linking business leadership to social and environmental concerns.

Accumulating experience across systems

Over the next three decades, John moved between roles that rarely sit together on a conventional career path. He led non-profit initiatives, built his own advisory business, and later became EMEA managing partner at Omnicom.

Rather than specialising in one sector, he accumulated exposure to how decisions are made across different systems. He worked with large corporations, charities, public bodies, and founders.

Over time, a pattern became clear to him. Activity was often mistaken for progress.

Organisations launched initiatives that looked responsible or innovative but sat alongside incentives that rewarded entirely different behaviour. In those moments, John became increasingly sceptical of programmes that existed at the margins rather than shaping core decisions.

Founding Anthropy

The pandemic sharpened that scepticism. Watching the strain placed on Britain’s social and economic fabric, John became concerned about how leaders were thinking about recovery and long-term direction.

In response, he founded Anthropy. Anthropy was conceived not as a conference business, but as a national leadership gathering focused on Britain’s long-term future. It brings together leaders from business, government, civil society, and younger generations.

The gathering takes place at the Eden Project, with sessions held inside the biomes rather than traditional conference spaces.

The environment is deliberate. It slows the pace and changes how conversations unfold.

Anthropy now involves thousands of participants, hundreds of speakers, and a significant emerging leaders programme for those aged eighteen to thirty. John describes this group as one of the most serious and hopeful aspects of the gathering.

The difficulty of stopping

John is clear that leadership failure rarely comes from backing the wrong idea. It more often comes from not knowing when to stop.

He distinguishes between three types of projects. Some succeed clearly. Some fail visibly.

The hardest are those that sit in the middle, producing just enough activity to justify their continuation without delivering meaningful results.

In his own career, John describes initiatives he allowed to fade once it became clear they would not deliver the collective impact he had hoped for. Ending them was not dramatic. It required detachment rather than urgency.

He notes that organisations routinely apply sell-by dates to products but almost never to internal initiatives. Without agreed endpoints, projects persist through habit and emotional attachment rather than relevance.

Purpose as a practical filter

For John, purpose is not a slogan or a communications device. It is a tool for decision-making.

When an organisation is clear about why it exists, decisions become simpler. Opportunities that sit outside that purpose can be declined without debate. Authority can be delegated because people understand the criteria behind decisions.

He contrasts this with organisations where purpose is displayed everywhere but shapes nothing.

In those cases, slogans coexist with incentives that reward contradictory behaviour. The result is not cynicism, but underperformance.

Employees can work without clarity. They work better with it. Purpose, when taken seriously, reduces distraction and narrows focus.

The unresolved tension

Despite progress in how organisations talk about responsibility, John remains concerned about short-termism. Quarterly reporting, constant media cycles, and performative leadership push decision-making toward immediacy rather than durability.

He believes this is as much a cultural issue as an economic one. Leaders are rewarded for speed, reaction, and visibility.

Maturity and restraint receive less attention.

Yet he remains optimistic. Through Anthropy’s emerging leaders programme, John sees younger leaders already practising a slower, more deliberate form of leadership. They are less interested in performance and more concerned with consequence.

Closing reflection

Modern organisations are not short of ideas. They are short of judgment.

Responsible leadership, in John’s view, requires fewer initiatives, clearer decisions, and the discipline to stop.

In an environment that rewards noise, responsibility may begin with restraint.

​Scene and Context

Executive search is under pressure.

Clients want speed, certainty, and scale. Artificial intelligence promises all three.

In leadership hiring, the stakes are higher than efficiency. Decisions shape culture, strategy, and long-term outcomes. In sectors like food and agriculture, they also shape health and environmental impact.

As AI tools move quickly into recruitment, the question is no longer whether they will be used. The question is where judgment should still sit with people.

Formation and Origins

Simon Heal did not begin his career in sustainability or food systems. He trained as a computer scientist and spent more than two decades in mainstream executive search, building leadership teams for IT, e-commerce, and fintech businesses. He describes himself as a technologist who moved into people work because he was drawn to detail, pattern, and character rather than sales.

The shift came later. About six years ago, his young son came home from school after watching a documentary on climate change. Simon recalls being asked directly what he was doing to help. The question stayed with him. He began to examine where his skills could have real effect.

“What am I really good at?” he remembers asking himself.

The answer was clear. Building teams. Finding leaders. Understanding potential.

A Turning Point Toward Food Systems

Food and agriculture stood out. Simon grew up in Cheshire, surrounded by farming. His grandfather was a farmer. The industry felt familiar and increasingly urgent. He saw a sector under strain, doing significant harm, but also entering a period of rapid innovation.

Rather than work broadly across the industry, he narrowed his focus. Simon chose to work only with companies aiming to shift outcomes, not simply improve optics. That decision led to the founding of Myco Search, a specialist executive search firm serving food tech, agri-food tech, and food health innovators.

The positioning is deliberate. Candidates know the companies are serious. Founders know the candidates are motivated by impact as well as role.

The Work He Is Doing Now

Myco Search focuses on leadership and specialist hires in emerging food technologies. Many clients are early-stage or scaling businesses. The work involves risk. Technologies are new. Track records are limited. Commercialisation is uncertain.

Heal is explicit about those realities. His approach is open book. Candidates are told early where the risks sit and what could go wrong.

Founders are asked directly about weaknesses, gaps, and pressure points.

The goal is not to remove uncertainty, but to avoid surprises.

AI, Recruitment, and the Risk of Repeating the Past

Simon is a long-time user of technology and an advocate for AI used carefully. He sees clear value in using tools to expand research capacity, reduce administrative load, and surface wider pools of candidates.

Where he draws a firm line is judgment.

AI systems learn from historical data. In leadership hiring, that means past profiles, past success, and past patterns. Simon warns that this can quietly reinforce narrow definitions of leadership and filter out potential that does not yet have a record.

“AI is very good at spotting patterns,” he says. “It cannot spot potential.”

In emerging sectors like food tech, that limitation matters. Innovation often comes from people who do not fit existing templates. Over-reliance on automated screening risks narrowing thinking at the moment it needs to widen.

Simon deliberately includes what he calls a wildcard candidate in many shortlists. Someone who does not look right on paper, but shows conviction, learning capacity, and alignment with the mission. Sometimes they are hired. Sometimes they are not. They almost always sharpen decision-making.

The Tension That Remains

Food businesses remain driven primarily by profit. Simon sees this as the central structural tension. Cheap, damaging food is rewarded. Healthier, lower-impact models struggle for scale.

If he could change one thing, he would reverse the order. Human and planetary health first. Profit second.

He is realistic about constraints. Companies must survive. Investors expect returns. But he believes leadership choices can move systems, especially when capital and talent begin to align with long-term outcomes.

Closing Reflection

AI will continue to reshape executive search. Simon does not resist that shift.

He argues instead for clarity about where tools end and responsibility begins.

In leadership hiring, judgment remains the work. The cost of getting it wrong is not just commercial. In food systems, it reaches into health, land, and trust.

Speed matters. Empathy matters more.

​Scene and Context

Frontline recruitment has become one of the hardest problems for large employers. Customer-facing roles demand patience, emotional control, and reliability, yet turnover is high and training pipelines are fragile.

Managers report the same pattern. Candidates start, struggle, and leave. The cost is not just financial. Service quality drops, pressure shifts to remaining staff, and trust erodes.

At the same time, thousands of people who want to work remain excluded from hiring processes because they lack stable housing. The two problems are rarely discussed together.

Standing Tall exists precisely at that intersection.

Formation: Seeing What Others Missed

Christy Acton did not arrive at this work through policy or theory. Before founding Standing Tall, he ran a night shelter in Birmingham.

What struck him was not disengagement, but readiness.

“Half the people there wanted to work,” he said. “But no one would give them a chance.”

The barrier was structural rather than personal. Without an address, applications stalled. Without income, housing remained out of reach. Christy described it bluntly: “No job, no home. No home, no job.”

What changed his thinking was what happened when that loop was broken. When someone secured work, the effect was immediate. “They’d come in at the end of that day transformed,” he said. “You could see the physical difference of this person feeling valued again.”

Where Employers Started Paying Attention

Standing Tall places people into specific roles where pressure is unavoidable. One of the clearest examples Christy returned to was customer service work at major railway stations.

These are not forgiving environments. Delays, complaints, and public frustration are routine. According to Christy, station managers noticed something unexpected about recruits who had come through homelessness.

“When someone comes into the station angry or not in a great state of mind,” he said, “our candidate is able to relate to them and help.”

The explanation was not technical skill. It was judgment. “They’ve been through some difficult times,” he said. “They have that emotional intelligence.”

For employers, this mattered. “If they’re trying to find staff who are going to stay with them for the long term,” Christy said, “they’re getting it from Standing Tall.”

Not Charity, Performance

Christy is careful about motivation. He does not present inclusive recruitment as an act of goodwill.

“The primary decider for them is that they need good staff,” he said. “And we’re finding them.”

Standing Tall’s model is deliberately narrow. Employers start with one role, one hire. Each person enters work alongside secure housing and twelve months of ongoing support. That stability reduces early drop-out, one of the most expensive failures in frontline recruitment.

Christy described what often follows. “They go, wow, this is really working,” he said. “And then our partnership grows from there.”

The social impact is real, but it follows operational success rather than leading it.

The Limits of the Argument

Christy avoids sweeping claims. Hardship does not automatically produce good employees. Standing Tall only works with people who are ready and motivated.

Nor does he argue that hiring alone can address homelessness. Housing supply and living costs remain structural pressures well beyond any employer’s reach.

What he does argue is specific. When recruitment relies too heavily on conventional signals, employers exclude people who are well suited to the hardest parts of the job.

“Hiring changes who is inside the organisation,” he said. “That’s harder than volunteering. But it’s where the real impact is.”

Closing Reflection

Standing Tall’s work reframes inclusion as a question of judgment rather than virtue.

In frontline roles, where emotional control and resilience matter more than polish, experience can outperform credentials. For employers facing chronic shortages, the most reliable staff may be those who fought hardest to re-enter work.

This is not a story about charity. It is about what happens when businesses widen their definition of capability and judge success by who stays, not who looks right on paper.