About Slight Advantage
Helping senior people find what's genuinely theirs — and bring it forward, under pressure, at the highest level.
About Ben
I'm an executive coach, publishing strategist, and programme director for senior leadership team development. I've spent my career helping senior people perform under pressure — in the coaching room, at the publishing table, and in the training hall.
For several years I led commercial and project-delivery teams at Performance Consultants International — Sir John Whitmore's pioneering company — supporting coaching and leadership programmes for leaders in global organisations including Johnson & Johnson, Siemens, Medtronic, Collins Aerospace, Louis Vuitton and Allianz. You can read about one of those projects in the Financial Times.
My coaching is grounded in GROW, trained with first-generation colleagues of Sir John Whitmore, and in the Inner Game, trained directly with Tim Gallwey's team. I'm a member of the International Coaching Federation and continue to work with Performance Consultants as an associate and ambassador.
In publishing, I've worked on some of the best-known titles in business, psychology and personal development — including Coaching for Performance — and I understand how all the key people think, from editorial to sales to translation rights, and where most authors lose the deal before it ever gets to offer stage.. My publishing clients are typically coaches, consultants and speakers who have built a genuine body of work and are ready to bring it to a major publisher — not as a vanity project, but as the next strategic move for their business and their field.
Alongside individual coaching and publishing consultancy, I direct coaching programmes for senior leadership teams — working as programme director with organisations that want to build coaching capability across their executive tier in a structured, well-governed way.
I hold a black belt in Jeet Kune Do — Bruce Lee's martial art — and train and teach regularly in a private class in central London. It's where I keep testing what I teach: that real performance under pressure isn't a matter of trying harder, but of developing the inner game until clarity becomes the default.
ICF member. PCI Associate and Ambassador. Based between London and Hertfordshire; working with clients across the UK, EMEA and North America.
The Philosophy
Bruce Lee's instruction to his students was precise:
"Research your own experience. Absorb what is useful. Reject what is useless. Add what is essentially your own."
It was meant as guidance for martial artists. It turns out to describe something much more universal — the process by which any serious practitioner moves from accumulated knowledge to genuine wisdom, and from a body of experience to a point of view that only they could hold.
It's also, more or less exactly, how this work operates.
With leaders, the process is about clearing the interference between their best thinking and the moment it's needed — helping them research their own experience of pressure, find what's actually serving them and what isn't, and act from a place that's genuinely theirs rather than inherited habit or anxious effort. Tim Gallwey's formula for this is one I've carried for years: Performance = Potential minus Interference. It's deceptively simple. The work of closing that gap is not.
With authors — most of whom are coaches or consultants who have spent years developing a body of work — the process is about translation. They know what they know. The question is how to surface the insight that's genuinely theirs, position it for a market that doesn't know them yet, and bring it to a publisher who can put it in front of the audience it deserves. The interference here isn't usually more around translation friction — the gap between experience and expression.
In the training hall, the same principle is practised under physical pressure: testing what you actually have access to when the moment counts, discarding what collapses under stress, and building what remains into something with reliable impact.
The thread connecting all three: the work is always about helping serious people bring forward what is specifically their own — with more consistency, more clarity, and less of the noise that gets in the way.
What This Work Stands For
Five values guide how this work is done — not as aspirations, but as the conditions under which the work actually works.
Wisdom — seeing things as they are, not as we'd prefer them to be.
Courage — choosing authenticity when comfort is the easier option.
Compassion — meeting growth with empathy, not judgement.
Personal growth — staying a learner, always.
Connection — building the trust that makes real work possible.
If you're curious about working together — as a leader, as an author, or as an organisation looking to build coaching capability across a senior team — the best next step is a conversation
You can learn more about Coaching for Leaders or The Business Author Advantage, or simply get in touch.
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