The Leadership Letter is a reader-supported publication. If you enjoyed it, forward it to a friend. Thank you! -- Phil. Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more. READ TIME: 7 MINUTES | 26 AUGUST, 2026 | READ ON PHILHSC.COM On 6 February 2018, SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy lifted off from Kennedy Space Center. I watched the livestream in awe. Its 27 Merlin engines created more than five million pounds of thrust to lift this massive spacecraft into space. There was a good chance it would end in a...
1 day ago • 7 min read
The Leadership Letter is a reader-supported publication. If you enjoyed it, forward it to a friend. Thank you! -- Phil. Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more. READ TIME: 7 MINUTES | 19 AUGUST, 2026 | READ ON PHILHSC.COM I had been in that elevator 100 times before. The doors opened and 50 team members started cheering. A red carpet rolled out in front of me across the office floor. I walked along it with no idea what was happening until someone near the back said, "That’s not him."...
8 days ago • 5 min read
Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more. READ TIME: 7 MINUTES | 5 AUGUST, 2026 | READ ON PHILHSC.COM In 2006, as a first-time CEO, I decided to host a lunch series for clients. An industry we all had an interest in was being disrupted, and those lunches were designed to be the place where we would agree how to co-invest and take advantage of what was coming. Small rooms, the right people and conversations that went somewhere. I had thought carefully about who belonged in the room and...
22 days ago • 4 min read
Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more. READ TIME: 6 MINUTES | 29 JULY, 2026 | READ ON PHILHSC.COM I was 14 years and nine months old when I started working at McDonald's. It was my first step into the working world and starts don't get much better than a business that has spent decades perfecting how it trains people, markets itself, and develops leaders from the counter up. The restaurant was run by a man named Philip. He knew the store inside and out, and he knew that his mostly...
29 days ago • 3 min read
Hi Reader, If you've been here for a while you know the importance I place on partnerships as a way to grow organisations. I've closed 250+ deals that have materially changed the trajectories of my businesses and those of the leaders I coach. In 2025, I converted that knowledge into a program that included nine self-paced video tutorials, templates, workbooks and ChatGPT-based AI-assistants. This program, called The Partnership Lab, helped students to dramatically accelerate the...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more. READ TIME: 9 MINUTES | 22 JULY, 2026 | READ ON PHILHSC.COM A year into building Drop Bio Health, I caught myself thinking about growth in a way I never had at any company before it. We were trying to put blood testing in people’s kitchens. A finger-prick sample, taken at home, used to catch chronic disease long before they could be diagnosed. And we were doing it in the middle of a pandemic, when the idea of anyone going anywhere near a clinic...
about 1 month ago • 7 min read
Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more. READ TIME: 7 MINUTES | 15 JULY, 2026 | READ ON PHILHSC.COM I made the Australian age-group triathlon team in 2004 and competed at the World Championships that year. If there had been a most-unlikely-to-succeed award for that, my name would have been at the top of the list. My method was simple and stubborn. Show up to training twice a day, work hard, repeat. The 100km swim weeks were met with 100km run weeks. As far as I was concerned, recovery...
about 1 month ago • 5 min read
Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more. READ TIME: 7 MINUTES | 8 JULY 2026 | READ ON PHILHSC.COM ‘I’m surrounded by people who mean well, but I can’t really talk to them.’ These were the words of a CEO I work with. She has a board that backs her, an executive team that respects her, investors who returned her calls on the same day and on paper she looked well supported. I’ve heard a version of that sentence from nearly every CEO I’ve sat with. We tend to file it under loneliness, as if...
about 2 months ago • 5 min read
Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more. READ TIME: 8 MINUTES | 1 JULY, 2026 | READ ON PHILHSC.COM At Drop Bio Health, I was convinced of something simple. If people could take a blood sample at home, from their finger, and post it back to our lab, they’d do it more often. And if they did it more often, we could see the changes that matter, like the early signals of chronic disease long before symptoms arrived. Convenience was what made early detection possible, and early detection was...
about 2 months ago • 7 min read