Mark Hawkins
Thirty years in technology. Fifteen of them leading people. One growing conviction that we've been asking teams to run a race nobody can win.
I have been working in IT since leaving university in 1997, the same year Office 97 shipped, Steve Jobs returned to Apple, and, perhaps most importantly, IBM's Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov. Boy, how things have changed since then.
Since 1997 I've lived through privately owned data centres giving way to virtualisation and public cloud; the “call and text” feature phone becoming the work-anywhere smartphone; offices emptying into homes as Covid accelerated a digital transformation that was already under way. And now the light-speed race of AI, an industry competing to have the first or best model, the biggest data centre, the leanest and most productive AI-enabled workforce.
Every one of those shifts changed how we work, how we think about work, and how we engage with it. The one constant has been the accelerating pace and the rising demand.
We have been slowly boiling our teams for years. From the foreword
I have loved being a people manager for the last 15 years of my career. I love helping people grow, watching them develop, guiding their careers and nurturing new talent. But there's a version of the frog-in-the-pan myth that applies squarely to modern work: put a team into gradually rising heat and they will adapt, and adapt, and adapt, until one day the work is twice what it was, with fewer people, less time and less support, and a new technology to absorb every few weeks. The works until it doesn't and that is where we are, the boiling point.
That realisation is where this series came from. Not from a theory, but from a Tuesday, an ordinary Tuesday with a genuinely brilliant team who were working flat out and still couldn't finish.
What I do
I lead a team of specialists working on AI and security at Microsoft, across Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Day to day that means watching organisations wrestle with exactly the tension these books are about: excellent, capable technology that stalls not because it doesn't work, but because nobody yet trusts it enough to let it near a real decision.
That vantage point shows up throughout the series, particularly in Chapter 5, where I argue that governance and security aren't the brake on adoption. They're what makes speed possible.
How I write
Most of what's in these books is 30 years of first hand experience backed up with hard evidence. Microsoft's Work Trend Index research alongside decades of organisational science, cited so you can check it for yourself. Some of it is framing: a way of seeing rather than a proven law. I try to keep the line clear. Where you read a figure or a research result, it's evidence. Where you read a metaphor or a rule of thumb, it's a lens, in my own voice. And where a figure belongs to a particular year's research, I date it, because these numbers move.
Get in touch
The best place to find me is LinkedIn, where Lead What You Can't Outrun is being serialised a chapter at a time. I read everything, and a fair amount of what's in Books Two and Three started life as a comment from someone who'd read Book One.
This series is written in a personal capacity. The views expressed are my own and do not represent those of my employer. Research from Microsoft's Work Trend Index is cited as published, publicly available work.