Navigating Mirkwood — The Middle of Every Transformation Is a Dark Forest
Before the company enters Mirkwood, Gandalf gives one instruction and then — infuriatingly — leaves: “Don’t leave the path.” Inside the forest there is no light and no sense of progress, and the path seems pointless. Off to the side, there are glimpses of fires…
Riddles in the Dark — Walking Into the Meeting Everyone Said to Avoid
The most famous chapter in The Hobbit has no battle in it. Bilbo is lost in the dark, deep under a mountain, facing a creature that means to eat him. What carries him through is a conversation. The riddle game with Gollum works because Bilbo…
The Tookish Side — The Unlikely Heroes Already on Your Payroll
Tolkien gives Bilbo two inheritances. From his father’s side, the Baggins: respectable, predictable, suspicious of anything that might make you late for dinner. From his mother’s side, the Took: the streak of adventurousness that polite hobbit society pretends not to notice. The whole book turns…
The Unexpected Journey — Why Good Companies Resist the Change They Need
Last December I posted an advent calendar on LinkedIn: twenty-four short reflections, each pairing a leadership principle with a moment from The Hobbit. Several people asked the obvious question: why does an IT transformation consultant keep quoting Tolkien? The short answer is in my company’s…
The Four Reviews That Keep a System Honest
At the end of the naming post I said the review cadence would come next, “because that’s where a good system most often quietly fails.” I want to make good on that, because it’s true, and because the failure is so ordinary that almost everyone…
A Tool, Never a Master — What John Lennox Adds to the Faithfulness Coach
In the last post I borrowed a story from John Lennox — the deepfake channel built in his name, the fabricated lectures his own audience believed — to sharpen a question I keep returning to: is your voice still yours? Since then I’ve sat with…
What the Pope’s AI Encyclical Says to Anyone Trying to Live Faithfully
Why I’m writing this In my first post here, I described what I had been building quietly for several months: a Personal Operating Model — a structured system for living intentionally. It applies the same enterprise architecture thinking I use with clients to the question…
An Unexpected Journey: People Development at the Foot of the Himalayas
BilboConsult’s first international engagement took us to Bhutan — the result of an unexpected phone call on a Lapland road. Here is the story of what we designed, what we delivered, and what it meant.
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