Curious Leadership with Dominic Monkhouse – Details, episodes & analysis

Can optimism really scale a company?

In this episode, Dominic chats to Dan Williams, CEO of Orean Personal Care, to explore what it really takes to lead through chaos - from doubling revenue in tough markets to leading with vulnerability, optimism, and Ironman-level discipline.

Under Dan’s leadership, Orean has grown from £3M to £30M turnover, becoming one of the UK’s fastest-growing contract manufacturers in the beauty industry — all while achieving B Corp certification and building a culture rooted in learning and care.

What you’ll learn

💪 How training for an Ironman reshaped Dan’s mindset as a CEO

💡 The power of optimism when leading through adversity

❤️ Why vulnerability builds trust faster than authority ever could

🏭 How Orean scaled without losing its culture or values

📈 What it takes to grow sustainably - from £3M to £30M

If you’re a founder or CEO navigating the messy middle of growth — trying to scale your team, your systems, and your mindset — this is a masterclass in how to stay human while building something extraordinary.

Book recommendations:

Unbeatable Mind - Mark Divine

The Obstacle is the Way - Ryan Holiday

Start With Why - Simon Sinek

Man's Search for Meaning - Viktor E Frankl

About the Guest:

Dan Williams is the CEO of Orean Personal Care, a UK-based contract manufacturer producing premium skincare, haircare, and wellness products for some of the world’s most innovative beauty brands.

Under his leadership, Orean has grown tenfold in revenue and achieved B Corp certification, balancing profit with purpose.

A lifelong endurance athlete, Dan brings his Ironman mindset into business — combining optimism, resilience, and relentless learning to build a company culture defined by progress, not perfection.

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Follow Dominic on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dominicmonkhouse 

AI hype is everywhere - but most of it is just noise. This episode cuts through it.

Dominic digs into what real artificial intelligence actually looks like with Daniel Hulme, Chief AI Officer at WPP and founder of Satalia and Conscium.

They explore why most so-called “AI projects” are really just automation in disguise, how to spot where genuine adaptive intelligence can unlock value, and what’s coming next - from synthetic audiences that test creative before launch, to the race toward conscious machines.

What you’ll learn:

• Why most “AI” isn’t intelligent - and how to tell the difference
• Where companies are misinvesting in generative tools
• How WPP uses AI to transform creativity and decision-making
• Why adaptive systems (not shiny models) are the real future of business
• How Daniel thinks about consciousness, empathy, and what humanity looks like in an AI-powered world

Book recommendations:

Behave - Robert Sapolsky

Surviving AI - Calum Chace

Genesis - Craig Mundie & Eric Schmidt

About the Guest:

Dr. Daniel Hulme is one of the UK’s leading voices in applied AI, ethics, and technology.

He’s Chief AI Officer at WPP, where he leads strategy and deployment of AI across 100,000 people, and Founder & CEO of Satalia, the AI company he started from his PhD and later sold to WPP for a reported $100 million.

Daniel recently co-founded Conscium, an AI safety company that tests and verifies AI agents - and is exploring whether machines could soon become conscious.

He holds a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from UCL, where he’s also Entrepreneur in Residence, and was named by AI Magazine as one of the Top 10 Chief AI Officers globally.

Who should listen:

CMOs/CEOs/COOs, data/AI leaders, product & strategy teams, and founders deciding where to place AI bets (and what not to build in-house).

Sign up to receive our weekly Curious Leadership newsletter:  https://subscribe.monkhouseandcompany.com

Follow Dominic on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dominicmonkhouse 

Elaine Jobson is a dynamic CEO, board director, and culture strategist with over 30 years of experience scaling fitness and wellness brands across Australia, Africa, Asia, and Europe.  

As CEO of Jetts Fitness, she spearheaded the Management Buyout (MBO), restoring the brand to private ownership and founder-driven leadership. Under her guidance, Jetts has flourished, expanding into new markets and repositioning for sustainable, high-performance growth.  

Elaine’s passion for values-driven, high-performing cultures is at the heart of her leadership philosophy. Her book, High Performance Through Happy People, captures her insights on building thriving teams that deliver exceptional results.  

A sought-after keynote speaker, Elaine energises audiences at industry conferences, leadership summits, and corporate events, sharing expertise on leadership, culture strategy, franchising, and team performance. Known for her sharp operational and commercial acumen, Elaine is a proven leader in strategic growth, franchising, and culture transformation - making her one of the most impactful figures in the industry today.

In this episode, Dominic uncovers how the implementation of a Net Promoter Score (NPS) should be a business philosophy rather than just a survey. With Elaine providing insights on identifying detractors through customer feedback, the importance of delivering what she calls “brilliant basics”, and the significance of empowering her club managers and staff to enhance customer service to create a positive culture.

Elaine also shares the rapid growth and expansion of the Jetts Fitness brand, their franchise model, commitment to good profit, the evolving perception of fitness as a means for mental health, and looks ahead at opportunities in the global fitness market, particularly in emerging territories like India.

Discover

How Leadership Drives Growth: Strong leadership is essential for managing growth, stabilising operations, and adapting to changing business environments.

How to Build a Positive Culture: A happy, engaged workforce leads to higher performance and better organisational outcomes. Culture is a key driver of long-term success.

How Metrics Can Improve Performance: Tools like customer satisfaction scores provide valuable insights and help businesses refine their services to meet customer needs, fostering loyalty.

Opportunities in Emerging Markets: Expanding into new markets with growth potential requires strategic planning, market understanding, and partnerships to capitalise effectively.

How Scalable Business Models are Key: Structuring businesses to scale - for instance, through franchising or other replicable models - enables sustainable growth and adaptability across regions.

Book recommendations:

Elaine’s book High Performance Through Happy People is out now

Dominic’s book Mind Your F**king Business is out now

This week we learned from the Chief Workplace Scientist at Gallup, Jim Harter. Jim is also the co-author of the Wall Street Journal bestseller Wellbeing at Work and the No. 1 Wall Street Journal and Washington Post bestseller, It's the Manager. Now, he’s written another book, Culture Shock, where he explores how organisations adapting to this culture shock will determine whether they thrive or even survive and whether U.S. and global productivity will go up or down.

Jim has been studying human behaviour in organisations for 37 years and really gets a kick out of studying what happens inside them. His work at Gallup is to study what happens in the populace at large and to do massive polls of the world and workplaces around the world and understand what's going on in people's work and lives. Last year, Gallup did a daily survey throughout COVID, and fifteen thousand people take part in their quarterly survey, so they got some fantastic data. That’s why we wanted to invite Jim to The Melting Pot to find out what that data said about working from home versus being fully remote, or hybrid. 

In this episode, we learned how many days in the office drive engagement. Also, do higher levels of engagement translate into better financial performance? How do we make business more productive and outperform our competitors? We also dig into the data about working from home versus in the office, and we find out what are the five things that drive wellbeing as humans, how to structure one-to-one meetings, and how often they should be. And finally, what are the top five things that we should talk about with our teams every week to drive high levels of engagement.

An absolutely fantastic conversation. Download and listen to learn more.

On today’s podcast: 

• Culture Shock
• The effect of COVID on engagement
• The five elements of wellbeing
• Fully remote, fully on-site and hybrid. What’s best?
• The managers are key to driving engagement

Follow Jim Harter:

Jim Harter - Gallup

LinkedIn

Culture Shock

2023 Gallup Exceptional Workplace Award Winners

Book recommendations:

Wellbeing at Work

It’s The Manager

Maslow on Management

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How can we generate thousands of ideas in your organisation? Feel overwhelmed just by thinking about it? Our guest on the podcast this week thinks that, if you can’t come up with thousand ideas, you’re unlikely to come up with a winner. That’s why he suggests creating an innovation tournament.

This week on The Melting Pot, we learned from Dr Christian Terwiesch, professor at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and Chair of Wharton's Operations Information and Decisions Department. Christian has written numerous business books but, in this episode, we wanted to learn more about his latest work, The Innovation Tournament Handbook. This book is a more practical approach to the theory he laid out in his first book, Innovation Tournaments. 

In this episode, Christian explains how to run an innovation process in your business and how to build an innovation tournament so that you’re running one every six months. That means lots of people get involved with loads of ideas emerging, all in a relatively low-cost way. He also talks about the importance of destigmatising failure in innovation and why we need to embrace it as part of the process of innovation. 

Download and listen to learn more.

On today’s podcast: 

• What is innovation, really
• The Innovation Tournament
• Removing the stigma of failure in the innovation process
• Getting the whole team involved in the innovation process
• The innovation dilemma

Follow Christian Terwiesch:

Website

LinkedIn

The Innovation Tournament Handbook

Other books

Book recommendations:

The Arsenal of Democracy

Innovation Tournaments

Connected Strategy

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How do you manage your metrics around innovation? How much investment do you need to put into innovation as a mature business? How do you give people the time and structure needed to innovate in your business? This week we asked one of the most influential strategy and innovation experts to come back to The Melting Pot to answer these and some other questions about innovation. 

Founder and CEO of Strategyzer, Alex Osterwalder reckons that seven out of ten projects that you start within your business need to be killed. And maybe one in ten of your innovation projects is a go, but you're going to need to build a portfolio of maybe 50 live projects that are at any one time to get enough innovation going in your business to make a material change, to get a return on your investment. He also introduced us to the concept of AKIs (Aspirations and Key Insights) – as opposed to Objectives and Key Results – for innovation teams not to produce results, but key insights to understand whether they should kill, iterate or scale a product.

Fantastic conversation with Alex. If you’re in the innovation arena, this is a must-listen for you. 

Download and listen to learn more.

On today’s podcast: 

• What’s the ideal innovation team
• How and when to kill your innovation ‘zombie projects’
• How to ‘fail faster’ in innovation
• Getting the best ROI
• AKIs (Aspirations and Key Insights) vs OKRs (Objectives and Key Results)

Follow Alex Osterwalder:

Strategizer website

LinkedIn

Twitter - @alexosterwalder

High Impact Tools for Teams

The Invincible Company

Testing Business Ideas

Book recommendations: 

The Courage To Be Disliked

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This week we learned from the inventor of the Outcome-Driven-Innovation (ODI) process, Tony Ulwick. Tony developed this process and, in 1999, he described it to Clayton Christensen, author of The Innovator's Dilemma. Although Clayton loved it, he didn’t like the idea of customers having a process, so he called it Jobs-To-Be-Done. Every customer has a job to be done, so what we can do is innovate around solutions to help them get that job done. 

What’s the job your customer is trying to get done? And how do you measure success? In this episode, Tony guides us through the process that innovators need to answer those questions, and he shares some interesting case studies of how he’s helped different firms understand what jobs their customers were trying to get done, and how to identify their unmet needs. 

A fascinating conversation with Tony.

Download and listen to learn more.

On today’s podcast: 

• The Jobs-To-Be-Done Theory
• How can you define a need
• The cases of Bosch and Conagra
• How your customers measure success
• Understanding the job that your customer is trying to get done

Follow Tony Ulwick:

Website

LinkedIn

Jobs To Be Done - Book and Audiobook

Book recommendations: 

What Customers Want

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Is there any fractured relationship in your team? Many teams have people with dysfunctional relationships that show up in different ways. Often people find it difficult to solve problems. Somehow we find ourselves with a breach of trust, breach of contract, or competence. We believe one of our colleagues isn't competent, and it grows like an inverted pearl in an oyster or stone in your shoe. When this happens, people move away from those relationships or change companies. But if a business is a team sport, it's like taking the field to play football with only nine players against the opposition because some people on your team have a dysfunctional relationship.

This week we talked with and learned from Doug Bouey, a coaching and facilitation veteran, recognised by Vistage/ TEC. His newest book, Fixing Fractures, creates a sure path to peace of mind and a quiet heart. Like Dominic, Doug holds a Gazelle’s (now Scaling Up) International qualification. He’s a master coach and, as part of his Vistage Chair life, Doug came across a facilitation technique to fix fractured relationships in business and life. So, he wrote his book Fixing Fractures, to help teams or individuals overcome these breaches of trust and help them build a high-performing team. 

In this episode, Doug guides us through his technique to help teams have these types of conversations and overcome this issue in their relationship. He explains the different levels or ‘gates’ of trust and how he helps individuals in businesses get to the bottom of their problems and what are the ‘Magic Five’ that need to be present during these ‘healing’ conversations.

Download and listen to learn more.

On today’s podcast: 

• Fixing Fractures
• How to fix dysfunctional relationships
• Understanding the breaches of trust in teams
• Team building workshops
• The Magic Five

Follow Doug Bouey:

Website

LinkedIn

Fixing Fractures

Book recommendations:

Fierce Conversations by Susan Scott

Difficult Conversations by Douglas Stone

The Science of Storytelling by Will Storr

The Status Game by Will Storr

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Why do we do the things we do? How did COVID truly affect our behaviour? Will our ability to empathise and connect with others ever fully recover? In a world of constant change and uncertainty, Dr Helena Boschi, a psychologist specialised in applied neuroscience, offers insight into how our brains are wired to react and cope and helps us make some sense of why we do what we do.

In this episode, Dr Helena Boschi discusses why we do what we do, which is also the title of her book. She also talked about feedback, why we are doing it, and what the real impact is. She gives some interesting tips on how to do it, how it works, and how the brain absorbs the feedback we give people. We also learned about the entrepreneur’s brain and what drives them, the effect of COVID on our empathy and much more. 

Download and listen to learn more.

On today’s podcast: 

• “Every child is an artist”
• Why we do what we do
• The Impact of COVID on our brains
• Why it’s so difficult to change our beliefs
• Something is wrong with feedback

Follow Dr Helena Boschi:

LinkedIn

Why We Do What We Do

Book recommendations:

One of the things that Helena recommends to the listeners is to read as much as they can and talk to everybody, “because everybody has got something to teach us”.

In particular, she truly enjoys the work of these authors: 

David Eagleman

Robert Sapolsky

Dan Ariely

Daniel Kahneman

Simon Sinek

Mathew Syed

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Are you struggling to achieve successful digital transformation despite continuous training and collaboration? Find out how to unlock agile decision-making with the military-inspired command by negation technique and improve employee engagement with immersive training programs - all while boosting manufacturing efficiency through SAP systems.

Marty Groover offers a unique perspective on the future of manufacturing. Drawing from his experience as a retired Navy officer and working in the manufacturing sector at Caterpillar, he has developed a deep understanding of the importance of technology integration and employee training. Now a partner and CTO at C5MI, Marty is dedicated to helping companies adopt Industry 4.0 technologies, creating smarter systems and more efficient processes. If you are a manufacturing leader, you will undoubtedly benefit from his insights, experience, and passion for innovation.

In this episode, Marty explains how you can boost manufacturing efficiency by harnessing the power of SAP systems, and how to drive digital transformation in your workplace. Marty is an advocate for creating a culture of learning, so he discusses how you can cultivate effective leadership and change management in your manufacturing operations, and unleash agile decision-making with the military-inspired command by negation technique.

A fantastic conversation with Marty.

Download and listen to learn more.

On today’s podcast: 

• Transforming the manufacturing operations through strategic SAP
• Bringing military systems to manufacturing
• Using real-time tracking to improve efficiency
• Creating a thriving learning culture by encouraging knowledge-sharing and regular upskilling
• Overcoming the problem of working in silos in business

Follow Marty Groover:

Website

LinkedIn

Speed of Advance

Book recommendations:

Relentless by Tim Grover

Winning by Tim Grover

Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink

You Can’t Hurt Me by David Goggins

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