Life In Business

About Life In Business

Messy Business is a podcast about business and work, and all the things we’ve been taught to believe about both. It’s here to help you think better, not just know more. Every week, I (your host, Libby Langley) take an idea about business or working life that has become lore, and look at it without any rose-tinted glasses. From productivity, success, and ambition to marketing, leadership, money, confidence, expertise, growth, and the latest internet business fad, nothing is safe from my questioning! Where did these ideas come from? Why did they become so appealing? What might actually be useful about them? And what are the realities that get left out? The point isn’t to tell you what to think. It’s to give you something worth thinking about, so you can form your own opinions and make better decisions about your work, business, and life. New episode every Thursday. 📙 Read my book, Life in Business - https://libbylangley.com/book 🔧 Work with me - https://libbylangley.com 📩 Get my emails - https://libbylangley.com/email Find me on LinkedIn (https://linkedin.com/in/libbylangley) or Instagram (https://instagram.com/libbylangley) (@libbylangley)

Publisher

Libby Langley | Business & Marketing Strategist

Category

business · business · business

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

24 Nov 2022

Latest episode

15 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

301 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   15 Oct 2026

   212: Are You Too Old? | #212

   Experience is valuable. Expertise takes time. Good judgement often comes from having seen things succeed, fail, change, disappear, and come back around again. So why does getting older sometimes make us seem less valuable in the workplace? In this episode of Messy Business, I'm asking when we're actually the right age to be taken seriously, and why the world of work seems determined to value experience while simultaneously worshipping youth. I explore ageism in employment, the mythology of the young entrepreneur, changing careers later in life, and the assumptions we make about people's ability, ambition, relevance, and willingness to learn. I also look at why ageing can be particularly complicated for women, with all the contradictory expectations around appearance, authority, experience, and staying relevant. Having recently turned 52, I've been thinking about what my own experience has given me. Fifteen years of running a business, working with thousands of people, making difficult decisions, getting things wrong, and learning what actually matters have given me judgement I simply couldn't have possessed when I was younger. But being older doesn't automatically make somebody wiser, just as being younger doesn't automatically make somebody innovative. Perhaps we need to stop treating age as shorthand for qualities it doesn't reliably tell us anything about. Because surely what matters is what somebody knows, what they've learned, what they question, and what they can actually contribute? 📙 Read my book, Life in Business https://libbylangley.com/book (https://libbylangley.com/book) 🔧 Work with me https://libbylangley.com (https://libbylangley.com) 📩 Get my emails https://libbylangley.com/email (https://libbylangley.com/email)

2. 

   8 Oct 2026

   211: Is Kindness Bad for Business? | #211

   Business is supposed to be efficient, productive, consistent, and commercially rigorous. But does it also have to be hard-nosed? We still have workplace rules and management practices inherited from a very different world of work, often designed around control, consistency, and the possibility that somebody might take advantage. And somehow, treating people with kindness can still be dismissed as soft, indulgent, or commercially naive. In this episode of Messy Business, I question whether that really makes good business sense. I look at everything from rigid working practices and Christmas shutdowns to compassionate leave, caring responsibilities, birthdays off, flexitime, and the tiny acts of generosity that can mean far more to an employee than they cost a business. Because kindness doesn't mean having no boundaries, tolerating poor performance, or saying yes to everything. Businesses still need to function, customers need to be served, and people need to know what's expected of them. But goodwill, trust, retention, discretionary effort, and reputation all have commercial value too. Being humane and being commercially rigorous aren't opposites. So what would happen if we looked at our policies and working practices differently? What is this rule actually trying to achieve? Who benefits from it? Are we managing good people around the hypothetical behaviour of bad ones? And could we achieve the same commercial outcome with more trust, flexibility, or generosity? Perhaps kindness isn't the opposite of good business. Perhaps it's evidence that somebody has thought properly about the people the business depends on.  Pasted markdown 📙 Read my book, Life in Business https://libbylangley.com/book (https://libbylangley.com/book) 🔧 Work with me https://libbylangley.com (https://libbylangley.com) 📩 Get my emails https://libbylangley.com/email (https://libbylangley.com/email)

3. 

   1 Oct 2026

   210: What the Point of Being in Business? | #210

   A successful business is supposed to go somewhere. Start. Grow. Employ people. Increase turnover. Expand. Scale. And perhaps eventually sell. But why does a business automatically have to become something bigger than the thing it already is? In this episode of Messy Business, I’m asking a more fundamental question: what’s the point of being in business in the first place? I look at the different jobs we expect businesses to do, from generating profit and serving customers to creating jobs, providing freedom, doing something useful, changing the world, and giving their owners a decent life. Growth absolutely has its place. It can create security, resilience, opportunity, investment, and impact. But we rarely spend as much time defining what enough looks like. I talk about my own experience of building a bigger, more complicated business and eventually discovering that I didn't particularly like the business I'd created. These days, my business is much simpler: I do useful work I'm good at, get paid for it, and have a life outside it. And I've stopped seeing that as a lack of ambition.  Pasted markdown Because before deciding how much your business should grow, how productive you should be, how you should market it, or where you want it to be in five years, perhaps there's a question more worth answering: what do you actually want your business to make possible for you? 📙 Read my book, Life in Business https://libbylangley.com/book (https://libbylangley.com/book) 🔧 Work with me https://libbylangley.com (https://libbylangley.com) 📩 Get my emails https://libbylangley.com/email (https://libbylangley.com/email)

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

YouTube views

30,395

Score snapshot 15 Sept 2025

Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

1 ratings

Spotify

4.6 / 5

9 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 77 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

96

Social presence

0

YouTube

76

Engagement

68

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Guest appearances

Books guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.

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