Curious Business: The B2B Growth Podcast

Every business wants change, and most probably need it. Technology, competition and the pressure to grow all demand it. But depending on where you sit, change can feel risky, frustrating or downright frightening. It can seem that good business strategy means planning out a new normal, but when people feel change done to them rather than with them, it tends not to work. How can organisations create change without triggering an 'allergic reaction'?

Amale Ghalbouni has spent nearly two decades helping organisations change. She started as a strategy consultant handing down answers, then moved into digital transformation and agencies, working in sectors as different as horse racing, financial services, retail and automotive. Her book, Experimental, argues that the process is rarely the problem. People are: their quirks and traits, their needs and anxieties, and the “allergic reaction” most of us have to being told to do things differently.

She’s candid about when it hasn’t worked, including her own badly handled restructure and a client sponsor who wouldn’t take no for an answer. She’s also clear that the patterns aren’t unique: “You’re not that special,” she says, kindly. Her book is built on five Cs, the conditions she believes teams need to change well: connection, clarity, curiosity, courage and celebration. On a show called Curious Business, it’s probably no surprise which one stood out for me.

Listen to this episode to find out…

Links

https://link.amazon/B04ShZ7GU (affiliate link)

Other episodes on related topics

Chapters

00:00 — Intro

--

Curious Business is here to bring you insights, experiences and ideas from founders, leaders and experts to help you think differently about your business and its marketing. Listen to more episode via https://pod.link/1783648578.

-- 

AI promises to do an ever-increasing and diversifying range of jobs for us. But MIT Sloan behavioural science professor Eric So says there’s a trade-off. Are people using AI to help them think, or instead of thinking? And, if so, what does that mean for the brain?

Eric's new book, The Collision: What AI Does to Us, isn't an anti-AI polemic. Instead, it explores the trade-off we might be making when we outsource to AI. Steve Jobs called the computer “a bicycle for the mind” – something that helps us to extend our range. Eric calls AI “a motorcycle for the mind” because, rather than elevating our thinking, it might send us racing headlong into losing our most valuable capabilities.

With vivid anecdotes and research Eric unpacks how dependence forms. He exposes the quieter dangers: sycophantic models that mirror our biases, echo chambers that harden disagreement, and an economic pressure he calls AI gravity that makes short-term advantage irresistible and long-term competence precarious.

Eric’s book ‘The Collision: What AI Does to Us’ (W W Norton & Co)

Connect with Eric at https://ericso.pro or https://www.linkedin.com/in/eric-so-87531768/

David Autor (MIT)’s research on how AI's benefits scale with a worker's prior experience:

0:01:04 — Why cognitive scores have fallen since 1975

0:06:51 — Why Eric wrote The Collision

0:10:50 — The cognitive ladder and abundant intelligence

0:17:04 — De-Skilling Me Softly: the warning signs

0:20:29 — The firefighters who trusted the camera too much

0:25:53 — Short-termism, lawsuits, and autopilot pilots

0:32:55 — Sycophancy, echo chambers and AI companions

0:35:54 — Good or bad? The motorcycle for the mind

0:42:25 — Guardrails, policy, and the AI arms race

0:48:20 — Optimism, and where to find the book

--

Curious Business is here to bring you insights, experiences and ideas from founders, leaders and experts to help you think differently about your business and its marketing. Listen to more episode via https://pod.link/1783648578.

-- 

What if the businesses that survive a crisis aren't the ones with the best plans but the ones who've already lived through the toughest days they could face? In this episode, Nick Drage tells me about business wargaming - rehearsal, role-play and the surprisingly serious business of play.

A toolbox borrowed from military history and modern games that create structured experiments. Teams step into scenarios, play out mergers from the target's point of view, or simulate cyberattacks to see how they might make decisions on the fly.

Listen to hear how the boardroom becomes a battlefield: leaders wrestle with the instinct to ‘pull the plug’ during an attack, internal teams are asked to play the hacker, and simulations demonstrate that real life rarely behaves like a textbook drill. Nick seeks to provoke hard conversations that prepare us to be better in the moment. From cyber red-team work to the simple, humane lesson of having a will, he explains why being prepared isn’t negative or morbid; it’s caring for the future.

Listen to this episode if you want to find out:

Nick Drage / Path Dependence:

The Handbook of Cyber War Games by John Curry & Nick Drage

Random: How to Thrive in an Unpredictable World by Matt Ballentine & Nick Drage

UK Resilience Academy white paper, "Wargaming in a Resilience Context"

Stone Paper Scissors:

--

Curious Business is here to bring you insights, experiences and ideas from founders, leaders and experts to help you think differently about your business and its marketing. Listen to more episode via https://pod.link/1783648578.

-- 

Are you finding it harder and harder to cut through the marketing noise? More channels. More content. More options. How can businesses stand out and connect with people who need their help? What’s certain is that it’s no time to be timid when it comes to brand strategy.

Tara Cloak is Strategy Director at HB, a 25-year-old independent B2B marketing and creative agency working with clients including Microsoft, CBRE and Grant Thornton. She came to brand strategy through design, driven by a conviction that creative work without strategic intent doesn't have meaning. When a former marketing director colleague told her that design was just "colouring in", she set out to combine the magic and logic in everything she does.

In this conversation, Tara draws on HB's own recent rebrand - trying to escape the pigeonhole of their own success. She argues that the most important brand work happens long before and long after the guidelines are handed over. If you're a leader, marketer or entrepreneur rethinking your brand strategy and trying to stand out, this episode is for you.

Listen to this episode to learn:

HB: https://uk-hb.com/

Connect with Tara on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/taracloak/

0:00:59 - From ‘colouring in’ to brand strategy

0:07:07 - The Driving Idea: what guidelines can't do

0:09:01 - When your people are your brand - and why that's a risk

0:12:08 - Logic and magic: what the research process actually looks like

0:13:52 - Why you should talk to your client's clients

0:18:22 - Why clients rebrand - and whether they should

0:21:55 - Familiarity breeds contempt

0:23:47 - The hidden work: change management

0:26:14 - Limit the ta-da moments

0:29:03 - AI and the end of production value

0:31:37 - What makes a rebrand meaningful

0:32:08 - Rebranding the rebranders: did it work?

0:33:17 - The metric Tara actually trusts

0:35:36 - Brands live in brains

0:36:31 - The boardroom test

--

Curious Business is here to bring you insights, experiences and ideas from founders, leaders and experts to help you think differently about your business and its marketing. Listen to more episode via https://pod.link/1783648578.

-- 

Is what you're building actually connected to who you are? And would you know if it wasn't? Nish Sharma knew. He had the banking career, the best car, the best house, four holidays a year - and a question he couldn't shake: what am I actually doing? 

The answer arrived at his grandmother's funeral. In the grief that followed, he found a 100-year-old family story nobody had ever finished: a bootlegger great-grandfather who started an alcohol enterprise with a Scottish army officer in 1940. Nish decided to finish it — in Edinburgh, with a Scottish gin and rum that carries both worlds in, and on, the bottle.

What followed was anything but straightforward. Near-bankruptcy. A wall of silence from UK retailers despite offering to pay for the shelf space himself. He survived a heart attack and put it in an email to a buyer who kept saying no. He chased one contract for five years and felt flat when it finally landed.

Listen to this episode to find out:

Connect with Nish:

Chapters:

00:55 — The business, the products, the team

--

Curious Business is here to bring you insights, experiences and ideas from founders, leaders and experts to help you think differently about your business and its marketing. Listen to more episode via https://pod.link/1783648578.

-- 

What exactly is an entrepreneur in residence, and why would one of the UK’s largest food distributors deliberately plant a founder inside its business? What experience do you need, what is the host looking to achieve, and what do you actually do day-to-day?

In this episode of Curious Business, Stephen Morris sits down with Andrew Allen, a founder who built, bootstrapped and burned out through two food startups, and now bridges the gap between founder insights and enterprise strategy. Discover how a single advocate inside a large distributor joins dots, shapes go-to-market decisions, and reveals what actually works in B2B relationships when you're embedded in the system.

Whether you’re a founder trying to find growth, a leader pondering how to keep your organisation curious and creative, or simply fascinated by how big food can be a force for change, this episode explores how entrepreneurial thinking can influence the levers of scale.

Listen to this episode to find out:

Links:

Chapters:

--

Curious Business is here to bring you insights, experiences and ideas from founders, leaders and experts to help you think differently about your business and its marketing. Listen to more episode via https://pod.link/1783648578.

-- 

Two-thirds of co-founded businesses will lose a founder at some point. Sometimes it's dramatic, maybe even existential - businesses sold amid conflict go for circa 40% less. However, the personal toll - the sleepless nights, the stress - rarely gets mentioned because of the NDAs... Jane Hales is trying to stop it getting to that point.

After stepping out of a three-founder business herself, Jane now works with founding teams in what she calls the "messy middle" — the point where the original excitement has faded, something feels off, and nobody's quite sure why. You might call it marriage guidance counselling for co-founders. The more she explains it, the more obvious it becomes that this is a gap nobody else is filling.

In this conversation, Jane makes the case that most co-founder conflict isn't a strategy problem. It's an emotional problem — and most of us make it worse by trying to treat it with business tools.

Listen to this episode to find out:

Chapters:

Get in touch with Jane:

--

Curious Business is here to bring you insights, experiences and ideas from founders, leaders and experts to help you think differently about your business and its marketing. Listen to more episode via https://pod.link/1783648578.

-- 

Work is fragmenting - but are B2B leaders ready? Matthew Knight has spent a decade studying lean teams and project-based freelance workforces. In this episode, we explore the real gaps between theory and practice: the hidden skills, processes, and mindset shifts companies overlook. If your business is going lean, you need to hear this.

Matthew Knight has spent the last decade studying exactly that question. He's an independent strategist, founder of the Independency Company, and through his research organisation Leapers he's worked with over 250,000 people navigating life outside permanent employment. He knows this world from the inside - and he has a few things to say about how most organisations are getting it wrong.

Matthew tells a human story: why people step into self-employment for control, flexibility and purpose, but how the reality often brings isolation, financial stress and a brutal learning curve. He shares how a Slack channel that became a community, and then Leapers research that has reached hundreds of thousands of freelancers. He argues the smartest companies are those that design for relationship, not just transaction - and that this design yields commercial as well as moral returns.

Listen to this episode to find out:

References and links

Related Curious Business episodes:

Chapter list

0:01:00 — From developer to independent strategist

0:03:08 — The trigger: one job, one Slack channel, one gap nobody was filling

0:06:15 — From community to research to advocacy

0:07:03 — Something like a union? Why one model can't solve it

0:08:10 — What stops agencies and freelancers working well together

0:10:41 — Why freelancers are better at navigating uncertainty

0:12:31 — Why people choose to freelance: control, flexibility, and necessity

0:15:09 — The lean core and the extended network

0:15:53 — Does the Chief Freelance Office already exist?

0:16:56 — The three Cs of contingent workforces

0:19:52 — From cost-minimisation to ROI: a new mindset

0:21:19 — Should freelancers push back on being told where to work?

0:22:13 — Outcomes vs. outputs: what freelancers can and can't control

0:24:17 — How the freelance market has changed in 10 years

0:25:06 — Tinder-fication of talent: platforms, commoditisation, and what next

0:26:03 — Accessibility, oversupply, and the changing freelancer demographic

0:27:23 — The Leapers survey: what the data actually shows

0:29:15 — Isolation, loneliness, and the knowledge gap

0:32:04 — A holistic approach: L&D, mentoring, mental health for everyone

0:32:48 — AI and the junior talent problem

0:33:38 — Are freelancers being used as mentors? What's actually happening

0:35:34 — "It has to be designed" — and why that's harder than it sounds

0:35:40 — The skills warning: 10, 12, 15 years until nobody has any

0:37:30 — Policy, the DCMS and the long game 

--

Curious Business is here to bring you insights, experiences and ideas from founders, leaders and experts to help you think differently about your business and its marketing. Listen to more episode via https://pod.link/1783648578.

-- 

How many of the companies or people you admire got where they are by following a process? And how many took advantage of a lucky break or serendipitous pivot? We almost never think about the influence of chance on business strategy  — the randomness in the path to every success.

What if the biggest competitive advantage isn't better planning - it's embracing randomness? Looking for the serendipity in business? Matt Ballantine, sociologist and co-author of 'Random: How to Thrive in an Unpredictable World,' reveals why the business strategy playbooks overlook the chance encounters that actually shape breakthrough growth.

Matt has spent thirty years helping organisations try to change. In this conversation, he explains why organisational barriers tend to have deeply entrenched roots, why best practice is almost always survivorship bias in disguise, why the most exciting sports tend to have randomness built into the rules, and why pattern-spotting is both an asset and a blind spot for us humans.

Listen to this episode to learn:

Links

Order Random the book: https://securityblendbooks.com/products/random

Connect with Matt on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattballantine/

Related episode: #24 with Neil Mullarkey:

Related episode: #6 with Dan Klein:

Chapters

00:54 — Sociologist or technologist? Why the distinction matters

01:56 — Baudrillard, McLuhan and the blurring of reality

04:15 — Why change keeps failing

05:26 — What grows back when you only deal with the surface

07:31 — The toilet test: reading company values in laminated notices

11:46 — Why Matt isn't a fan of best practice

13:08 — How a book about Random-ness came about

14:28 — Cards as a facilitation tool

16:48 — Apophenia: the compulsion to find patterns where none exist

18:34 — Who is the book for? Why is the book for?

19:12 — The format: why it's not really a book

25:03 — How the book can be used

25:56 — The five meanings of "random"

27:56 — Three reasons randomness is useful

28:34 — Facebook, Friends Reunited and survivorship bias in tech

30:06 — Businesses ofter don't like uncertainty — but they should

31:48 — The ovoid spheroid and randomness in sport

33:39 — Does randomness fly in the face of AI?

35:54 — The Watford employment agency: October 1993

38:15 — The first act of randomness every leader should embrace 

--

Curious Business is here to bring you insights, experiences and ideas from founders, leaders and experts to help you think differently about your business and its marketing. Listen to more episode via https://pod.link/1783648578.

-- 

Most B2B software companies are leaving serious money on the table — not because the product isn't good enough, not because the sales team needs more training. It's the pricing strategy. It's not the number you choose, it's everything that comes before it.

Roee Hartuv is the founder of Willingness to Pay, a consultancy that helps B2B SaaS companies redesign product pricing and packaging from first principles. His philosophy is simple: stop pricing the product, start pricing the customer. B2B SaaS pricing strategy is the silent revenue multiplier most founders ignore. Discover how value-based pricing and packaging can transform your go-to-market strategy.

In this conversation, we get into:

Whether you're setting prices for the first time or running a mature product business that hasn't revisited its model in years, this episode will make you think differently.

Connect with Roee:

On LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/roeehartuv/

Willingness to Pay YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@SaaSPricing/videos

Chapters:

--

Curious Business is here to bring you insights, experiences and ideas from founders, leaders and experts to help you think differently about your business and its marketing. Listen to more episode via https://pod.link/1783648578.

--