The Seven™ published
1 min read
The Seven is live: a standard for evidence-based leadership decisions.
Boards apply serious rigour to financial risk, operational exposure, and regulatory compliance. Then they make the most consequential people decision in the cycle on conviction and a label.
That is not a criticism. It is an observation that kept recurring over fifteen years of succession work. The evidence for better leadership decisions exists. The discipline to use it at the board level mostly does not.
The Seven is a series of essays addressing that gap. Seven governance disciplines for how boards record, bound, and defend the claims they make about people. Each one is grounded in academic literature and practitioner experience, and each one is honest about where the evidence runs out.
The first three articles are live now. The remaining four surface across Spring and Summer 2026.
If you sit in or around a boardroom when these decisions get made, the series was written for you.
Read the introduction to The Seven →
The Author
James founded inBeta, transforming executive talent with innovative multi-modal AI and behavioural science. For over two decades, he has partnered with ambitious scale-ups, global brands, and significant public limited companies, developing inclusive and agile leadership teams. Certified in CliftonStrengths (Gallup), Hogan (inc PBC 360), FIRO-B (Myers-Briggs), and Cultural Intelligence (CQC), James holds executive education from Saïd Business School, University of Oxford in Strategy, Innovation, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Executive Leadership, Finance, and Professional Services.
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