Prove
Establish the IP
Find and pressure-test the IP unique to you. Prove it against the field, so it is authority rather than opinion.
lifestack · Founding cohort · In association with Book Magic AI and Dent Global
Board seats end.
A body of work doesn't.
A founding cohort for eight non-executive directors. We take what only you know and turn it into proven authority assets from the first week, with a book accreting behind them.
Check your position · 3 minutes
Eight places. Founding terms. The diagnostic is the application.
The trigger for this is rarely the next career step. You have the seats, or you know how to win them. The question that arrives instead, somewhere between one board pack and the next, is quieter. How much of this is mine? What will still be standing when the terms end?
Most of what a non-executive director really knows has never been written down anywhere. It lives in judgement calls, in the question asked at the right moment, in what you learned the year the deal went wrong. Search firms cannot see it. Chairs cannot read it. It retires when you do, unless you set it down.
There is a harder, commercial edge to this. In the advisory market, executive experience is table stakes. It gets you the conversation; it rarely gets you the role. What separates the directors who are sought out is a visible, tested point of view: something the market can read before you enter the room.
The conventional answer is a book, and the conventional route to one asks you to disappear for the best part of a year, working on a single artefact, with nothing to show until it is published. We built a different route.
Prove, encode, compound.
Encode
Turn it into assets
Encode the proven IP into tangible things: a cornerstone, then articles, posts, talks, a boardroom playbook, skill files. Each one real, each one usable now.
Compound
Let it build
Every asset feeds the next, and every milestone becomes new material. The body of work grows on its own, and a book accretes inside it.
- Motive. What you want to be known for. What outlives the board seats. We surface that first, because it decides everything after it.
- What you know. We excavate what is in your head and what you have already produced. At this level it is usually more than a book's worth, unconsolidated. The starting line is not a blank page.
- What others know about what you know. Your IP is pressure-tested against the field. This is what turns a career retrospective into a point of view.
- The cornerstone. One area of your IP, done properly, with the asset cascade around it: article, posts, playbook, skill files. Working from the first week.
- The Book Magic method, taught analogue. Lucy McCarraher teaches the method itself, in the room, before the software accelerates it. You understand the method before the tool.
- The engine. You leave with a running system. Every future board seat, talk and framework becomes raw material that compounds. The book is what accumulates inside it, not a distant prize you are betting on.
You came in thinking the book was the hard part. You leave having done the hard part, the thinking, with a structure and an engine that make the writing the part that compounds.
What eight people will leave with.
A cornerstone article that carries your point of view. A series of posts built from it. A boardroom playbook that travels into the rooms you serve. Skill files encoded so an AI can read and run what you know. Your book's architecture, loaded and underway with Book Magic. And the engine itself: a running system, supported by our software, that keeps surfacing more of your IP as your portfolio grows.
1:1 and small-group sessions throughout. Both platforms, lifestack and Book Magic, free for the duration.
Is your expertise board-grade IP, or a CV?
The diagnostic takes three minutes and gives you an honest read across three dimensions: motive, material and visibility. It is also the application for one of the eight places.
If the diagnostic does not load, open it here.
Run by people who sit where you sit.
Steven Bianchi
Steven Bianchi chairs the Board of Directors at Sensat, advises Revolut, and is Chief People Officer at AUTODOC. He is not teaching a theory. He is describing his own working life.
Claire Alvis
Claire Alvis built the lifestack method and proved it on herself first: more than seventy long-form essays, roughly eighty thousand words, before a single new sentence was written for a book.
Lucy McCarraher
Lucy McCarraher and Book Magic AI bring the book method, taught in person before the software accelerates it.
Daniel Priestley
Daniel Priestley and Dent Global endorse the programme and are helping fill these eight places.
In association with Book Magic AI and Dent Global.
Founding terms.
£3,000 for the founding cohort. The regular price will be £4,500. The founding price is not a discount gimmick; it is the deal for going first. You get closer attention, both tools free for the duration, and a programme being proven with you rather than on you.
Eight places, so we can watch how it goes. The second cohort will be larger, and it will pay the full price.
Included: the full method from motive to cornerstone, 1:1 and small-group sessions, the Book Magic method taught by Lucy and her team, Book Magic access from session five to at least one month beyond the end of the cohort, and lifestack as the home of the work afterwards.
Dates: [PLACEHOLDER: cohort start date and session cadence]
"I don't have the time." The programme is built for people who don't. The thinking happens in the sessions; the system does the compounding between them. The conventional route costs a year of evenings. This one pays back from the first week.
"I'm not ready to write a book." You are not asked to. The book is what accumulates inside the system, not a blank page you are sent away to fill. Several people will find the cornerstone and the playbook are the point, and the book follows when it is ready.
"Why lifestack?" Because we ran it on ourselves before offering it to anyone. The method you would use is the method that produced our own body of work, and the people teaching it hold the seats you hold.
Eight people will leave this cohort with their authority proven and a book underway. Whether you should be one of them is partly a question of timing and material. The diagnostic will tell you, honestly, in three minutes.