Pyramid Scheme
A new book by Ken King
“Not as a metaphor. As a description.”
Sport is a 160-year-old society — and it’s failing the way societies fail: quietly, from the inside, while everyone stares at the scoreboard.
I help people measure what actually drives performance.
Keynotes, books, and the GRW Project's behavioural analytics — for coaches, HR leaders, and executives who make the biggest calls on people. The invisible drivers of performance, finally made measurable.
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Trusted by coaches, federations, and leadership teams · Personal reply within 2 business days.
When was the last time you looked back and saw how far you have come.
Trusted by the people who shape how others perform
A coach who got curious about what couldn't be measured.
I started on the floor, working directly with athletes, teams, and leaders. The same thing nagged at me everywhere: the factors that actually decided outcomes were the ones nobody could see. How someone held up under pressure. How a room shifted when a coach walked in. How a culture quietly eroded long before the results did.
Everyone agreed those things mattered. Nobody could measure them. So the most important decisions, the ones about people, kept getting made on gut feel. Closing that gap is the throughline behind everything I build, write, and coach.
"Measurement without improvement is just data. The point was never the number. It's the person who gets better because of it."Ken King
The work, in six parts.
Founder & CEO, Boost InnovationHow measurable is your team's human side?
Five quick reads on whether you can actually see the invisible drivers of performance — composure, culture, and proof of impact. Rate each from 1 (pure gut feel) to 5 (we measure it). Your score updates live.
Books for coaches, competitors, and curious kids.
Plain-spoken field guides circling one obsession: how people actually perform. Written for the people who shape how others show up.
Pyramid Scheme
How sport became an empire, why it is collapsing, and how we rebuild the game.
Read more →
Leading on the Edge
A no B.S. guide to thriving in a chaotic world.
Buy on Amazon →
The Smile Sheet
How a comfortable number took over every organization, and what it has been hiding.
Buy on Amazon →How I came to measure the invisible.
It started on the floor.
I worked directly with athletes, teams, and leaders. The same thing nagged at me everywhere: the factors that actually decided outcomes were the ones nobody could see.
Everyone agreed it mattered. Nobody could measure it.
Composure under pressure. How a room shifts when a coach walks in. Culture eroding long before the results do. The most important calls kept getting made on gut feel.
So I started writing it down.
Five books for coaches, competitors, and curious kids, all circling one idea: make the invisible part of performance something you can actually name and talk about.
Then I helped build the instrument.
The GRW Project reads behavioural signals from ordinary video. Composure, presence, and clarity, read in about ninety seconds. The thing nobody could measure, measured.
Now the most important calls get evidence.
Not to replace judgment, but to give the people who shape how others perform something sharper than a hunch.
Talks about performance, culture, and making the invisible measurable.
I speak to teams, clubs, federations, and leadership groups on human performance, building healthy culture, and what behavioural data can and cannot tell us about people. Six signature talks, each built for a different room.
Small signals, measured.
What a reading surfaces
Illustrative signal strength from a single 90-second room read.
Figures are illustrative of the GRW read, not a specific engagement.
Composure, trained
A trainable skill: reps move the number, week over week.
Illustrative trend across an eight-week block.
The Pyramid Scheme companion, on the house.
A practical field guide for putting the ideas to work with your team. No cost, no strings — a first taste of how Ken thinks about performance.
What people take away.
Ken didn’t hand us another motivational speech — he gave our leadership team a language for performance we still use in every quarterly review. Six months later it’s the framework the whole department runs on.
We brought Ken in for a half-day with our coaching staff and it reset how we talk to athletes about pressure. Practical, no fluff, and the players actually bought in — which almost never happens.
I’ve read a shelf of performance books and Ken’s is the one my managers keep quoting back to me. It’s the rare read that turned into actual behaviour change on the floor.
Our team was skeptical about another consultant. Ken won them over in the first twenty minutes and left us with a scoreboard we could actually act on. Engagement numbers are up and people point to that session as the turning point.
The GRW read took me about ninety seconds and told me more about where my team was struggling than a full engagement survey. We’ve made it part of our monthly rhythm.
Ken speaks to a room full of executives and a room full of front-line staff with the same credibility. That’s rare. Everyone left feeling like the message was built for them.
Let's talk.
Speaking, coaching, a partnership, or something else entirely. Tell me what you have in mind and I will get back to you within two business days.
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