I'll admit I put two guests in the same room for this episode of Reading Ahead (the podcast I host for the University of Reading) who, on paper, couldn't have come from more different worlds. Major General Nick Cowley is Commandant of the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, responsible for training every officer and soldier who leads in the British Army. Daniel Tapp is a first-year undergraduate at the University of Reading, one of the very first students on our Global Sustainability Leadership Scholarship. Thirty years of leading in combat and peacetime on one side of the table; a career barely begun on the other. I wanted to know whether leadership could look the same from each end of that spectrum.
It did. What struck me most, listening back, was how completely their two definitions of leadership converged on the same idea: that leading well starts with serving, and that it's built from the ground up rather than imposed from the top down.
Nick put it in three words the Army trains into every officer: knowledge, character and action. But the phrase that stayed with me was Sandhurst's motto — serve to lead. His point was disarmingly humble: you can't be a leader if you're not serving those you command.
Daniel arrived at almost exactly the same place from a completely different direction. He described the leaders who've shaped his own thinking not as commanders but as people who bring communities together and carry them forward. Leadership, for him, is what happens when everyone in a room becomes more than the sum of their parts, because someone has drawn out the best in each of them and directed it towards a common goal.
That's community-led leadership from two ends of a career, and I don't think it was a coincidence that they agreed. It's an idea I've come to believe applies well beyond the military and the university, too: the healthiest institutions aren't the ones with the clearest chain of command, they're the ones where leadership is distributed, earned continuously, and built on service rather than position.
The part of the conversation I keep returning to, though, is Daniel's definition of sustainability, because I think it's the best I've heard articulated in a single sentence. He described it as being ready to meet the needs of today, tomorrow and the future — economically, socially and environmentally — and was insistent that sustainability isn't just an environmental question, it's a question of whether we can genuinely afford to keep going as we are. That framing took me straight back to a relationship I built during Ella's Kitchen's early years, with a US company called Seventh Generation, named after the Native American philosophy that any decision you make today should be weighed against its effect seven generations from now.
If there's a single thread joining a Sandhurst general and a first-year sustainability scholar, it's this: real leadership is service, it's built collectively rather than commanded from above, and it only counts if it's still standing up for the people who come seven generations after you.
You can listen to Reading Ahead on your favourite podcast platform, or watch the full conversation on YouTube.
https://open.spotify.com/show/5tNsx8749eoqbmchQHKMJd?si=e12a3cfe506d4efe
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLylFnZp3uiE