Nick left Spark in 2019 to set up Five, believing most organisations already have a strategy worth delivering, and that what gets in the way is the gap between what leaders agree and what their people experience afterwards. Five exists to close that gap and to leave organisations stronger once it's gone than they were when it arrived.

Chief executives, executive teams and boards bring him in when the stakes are high: setting purpose and direction, deciding who the organisation is for, building a leadership team that pulls together, and making change stick.

He brings more than 20 years' experience in leadership and organisational development. He started out in London at Barclays Capital, Lloyd's of London and Goldman Sachs, where he was a vice president at Goldman Sachs University for the securities division across Europe, the Middle East and Africa. In New Zealand he led learning and organisational development at Deloitte and Spark.

He's direct, curious and practical.

I've recently written about:

People

Nobody can tell you what your potential is

Potential ratings are a guess that allocates the opportunity, so the guess makes itself true. Two evidenced axes to use instead.

Strategy and leadership

The delivery gap: a manifesto

Nick Mackeson-Smith on the gap between the strategy on the wall and the reality on the floor: why it opens, what it costs, and why Five was built to close it.

Technology

We've given them the tools

"We've given them the tools." It gets said in steering committees with a kind of finality, as though the sentence closes the matter, and on paper it's usually true. The licences are bought, the rollout is done, the training deck went out. WalkMe's 2026 State of Digital Adoption report puts a number on how differently the people using those tools see it, and the number is sixty-seven percentage points.

Technology

What we build in Smartsheet, and what we ask before we build it

When someone gets in touch about Smartsheet the request is usually quite specific; a dashboard, or a spreadsheet that's grown past what a spreadsheet can carry, or a view of everything that's running that nobody can produce without a fortnight's notice. We can build any of it. Here's what that work actually looks like, and the question we ask before we start.

Strategy and leadership

You wouldn't parent like it's 1995. So why are you still leading that way?

Leadership styles built in the GE era of command-and-control are colliding with AI. The work micromanagement was built around (approvals, status updates, oversight) is exactly what AI does faster. Why outcome-led, trust-based leadership is no longer a nice-to-have for NZ enterprises, and what the shift actually requires.

People

The belief comes first. The performance follows.

Most organisations spend enormous energy managing targets, KPIs, and performance reviews - and very little time on the thing that's actually doing most of the driving. Nick Mackeson-Smith, founder of Five NZ, makes the case that performance follows belief, not the other way around, and that the most powerful lever in any performance culture sits at the very start of the values-to-outcomes chain, not the end. Drawing on the values-to-outcomes model - and on watching his sons Ethan and Harry prepare for their football season - Nick explores why teams get stuck, how belief and performance can fall dangerously out of sync, and what organisations can actually do to surface and shift the mindsets that sit underneath their results. If your organisation has the strategy, the people, and the targets in place but still isn't performing at its best, this is worth a read.

Culture

The gap between what we say and what we do

I was sitting in a boardroom a few months ago, watching a leadership team talk with real pride about their culture. They used all the right words, and they meant every one of them. Then I spent two days walking the floors, and what I saw was different. Not dramatically different, but quietly and persistently misaligned in ways that nobody seemed to notice. That gap between intention and action is where most culture work needs to start.

Strategy and leadership

Stop counting blades of grass

Someone asks you for a report. You go off, pull the data, build the slides, present the findings. They say that's not what I meant. Most reporting nightmares start the same way - someone asks a question without knowing what they'll do with the answer. Here are four questions that change everything.

People

The leadership readiness gap

Organisational change is outpacing leadership capacity, and most boards aren't measuring the gap. With 72% of leaders admitting they're not fully prepared for what's next, the question isn't whether to invest in people development, but whether your approach is actually working. We explore why traditional leadership programmes fall short, the four questions every board should be asking, and what it takes to build leadership capability that's wired into your strategy.

Nick Mackeson-Smith

I've recently written about:

Nobody can tell you what your potential is

The delivery gap: a manifesto

We've given them the tools

What we build in Smartsheet, and what we ask before we build it

You wouldn't parent like it's 1995. So why are you still leading that way?

The belief comes first. The performance follows.

The gap between what we say and what we do

Stop counting blades of grass

The leadership readiness gap

You can talk to me about:

360 diagnostic

AI strategy and enablement

Board and ELT advisory

Capability and talent

Capability mapping and organisational alignment

Capability uplift

Culture advisory

Culture Discovery

Discovery

EX and CX mapping

Executive coaching

Executive Traction Labs

Want to work with us?