Edition 48 | 18 August 2026

Welcome to The Perspective, a weekly note on work, leadership, and clarity. The aim isn't to add another voice to the noise. It's to slow down for a moment, look at something carefully, and see what's actually underneath. Some editions land practical, some more reflective. All chosen to help you navigate complexity with a steadier hand.

This week's note is drawn from a small observation I've been making at recent conferences, about a piece of language that quietly costs us more than it saves.

What the Labels Miss

At recent conferences, meetings and coffees, I've noticed the same small moment happen more than once.

Someone will say, in conversation, that they are an introvert. Small-group people, they'll add. They don't like the big crowd energy. They avoid the plenary; they're happy at a smaller table; they prefer one-on-one.

But watching them work a room, or move through a smaller gathering, is not what most observers would call introversion. They're warm, curious, engaged, present. They ask good questions. They remember what people said. They follow up. The reader would be forgiven for calling them an extrovert.

What I think is actually happening is that we have too few categories for how people relate to other people.

Introvert. Extrovert. That's mostly it. Psychologists have added ambivert to the vocabulary (someone who sits between the two), but the word hasn't really landed in how we describe each other every day. Most of the working world still runs on a two-label system.

The two labels don't hold most of the actual variety. Most people aren't purely one thing. They're a blend that shifts. Some are highly social in small settings but drained by large groups. Some are the opposite. Some are energised by strangers and exhausted by close friends, or the other way round. Some are extroverted at work and introverted at home. Some depend on context, mood, and how well the day has gone before the moment arrives. The full picture is closer to a spectrum with several axes than a binary line.

Which is worth naming because a lot of professional advice (on networking, on meetings, on leadership), rests on the two-label assumption. Introverts are quiet, extroverts are outgoing, everyone falls neatly into one of the two. Some of the best networkers I've watched are self-described introverts who thrive in small conversations and disappear entirely at large events. The advice designed for them, and for the leaders trying to develop them, would be sharper if it started with different questions.

The same overreach shows up wherever a two-label system meets a more complicated reality. Introverts and extroverts. Leaders and followers. Optimists and pessimists. Detail people and big-picture people. Risk-takers and risk-avoiders. Each of these labels can be useful in short bursts of shorthand. Each of them, taken as a fixed identity, quietly does damage, to how we see other people, and often more importantly to how we allow ourselves to be seen.

The person who says I'm an introvert has often been describing themselves that way for so long that they've stopped noticing when they aren't. That's not a personality problem. It's a language problem: the categories can't hold what's actually true, so we round ourselves off to whichever label is closest.

The point isn't to invent new labels. It's to hold the ones we have more lightly.

👉 I shared the shorter version of this on LinkedIn last week:

View the full post and comments on LinkedIn

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New article last week

I published a longer piece last week called The Space Between a Full CFO and No CFO. It's about the models that have emerged between hiring a full-time CFO and having none at all: permanent, day-based fractional, hours-based fractional, and ad-hoc consulting, and how to think about which fits which kind of business.

The piece works through what each model does well, where each one strains, and the three questions worth asking before choosing between them.

If that thread interests you, here's a link:

Read the full piece

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On My Desk

The week's diary is unusually full of catch-ups. Nine in five days: some in coffee shops, some on video calls, some scheduled a month ago and some added at short notice.

None of these have an agenda in the way most work meetings do. There's no deck. Nobody is presenting anything. The point is the conversation itself, and, more honestly, the maintenance of the relationships that make the rest of the work possible.

I used to think of weeks like this as unproductive. Nothing to point to at the end of them. Now I think of them differently. The catch-ups that don't have an obvious purpose in the moment are almost always the ones that matter most a year later. The relationship that leads to the referral. The friend who becomes a client. The old colleague who introduces you to your next role. None of it was ever visible on a Tuesday.

Some weeks are for building. Some are for keeping the ground steady. It took me longer than it should have to tell the two apart.

Closing Perspective Most of the labels we use to describe ourselves and each other were designed for shorthand; quick summaries in an era when a summary was the best anyone could do. The strange thing is how easily the shorthand takes over. The summary becomes the thing itself. The category becomes the identity. The work, quietly, is remembering that we are always more than the words we've used to be understood. Keep thinking. Move forward. — Yusuf Visit my website

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