Professor Alistair Noble: A University Is For Saving the World
My guest this week is Professor Alistair Noble, President of Nan Tien Institute, a small independent higher education provider near Wollongong grounded in Buddhist values.
26 August 2026
This week’s essay
31 August 2026
Raising the Sea Level
The remedy has no dashboard, vests over years, and mostly benefits your successor—which is precisely why it is avoided. The final essay in the Prior Obligations series sets out what raising the general level of competence actually requires, and why no tool can be bought in its place.
This week’s conversation
26 August 2026
Professor Alistair Noble: A University Is For Saving the World
My guest this week is Professor Alistair Noble, President of Nan Tien Institute, a small independent higher education provider near Wollongong grounded in Buddhist values.
On the Subject of LeadershipListen
The index
Read by argument
Filed by argument, not only by topic
Organisations substitute legible proxies for the harder work of judgement. Eight arguments follow from that, and every essay advances one.
I
The Saviour and the Hammer
3 essays IIThe Aperture
Not yet indexed IIIThe Guardians
Not yet indexed IVThe Theatre
Not yet indexed VThe Permanent Pilot
5 essays VIThe Artisan
Not yet indexed VIIThe Proxy Mind
Not yet indexed VIIIBuilding the House
Not yet indexed
On the Subject of Leadership
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Conversations with people who carry responsibility
No slogans. Research-led conversations on authority, judgement, coordination, and accountability under real constraints.
David Harvie: The Falcon's Club
What do you do with a system that worked? The leadership literature is well supplied with accounts of systems that fail. Bad incentives, perverse
19 August 2026
Jay Fontanini — You Cannot Skip the Stages
Most conversations about artificial intelligence and the executive begin with a number that refuses to move. For the better part of a decade the
12 August 2026Recent essays
The full archive →
Raising the Sea Level
The remedy has no dashboard, vests over years, and mostly benefits your successor—which is precisely why it is avoided. The final essay in the Prior Obligations series sets out what raising the general level of competence actually requires, and why no tool can be bought in its place.
Inner Circle
One Rule for the Deck, Another for the Bridge
The mandate travels downward and the exemption stays where it was written. The fourth essay in the Prior Obligations series examines organisations that require AI of the crew while the bridge quietly abstains, the consumption quota that enforces it, and the questions a director might ask.
The Commons
The Verification Asymmetry
I can audit a model's output on leadership and must take its tax advice on faith. That asymmetry is the whole problem, and it is not psychological. The third essay in the Prior Obligations series argues that AI does not deskill the competent—it unmasks the fake.
The Commons
The Score
A score creates an owner, a dashboard, a target, and a budget—everything except an improvement in the condition it measures. The second essay in the Prior Obligations series examines what happens when 'psychological debt' becomes a number, and which way its arrows actually run.
The Commons
The Old Complaint in New Clothes
Six new names for old wounds. The 'psychological debt' said to accompany AI is neither novel nor peculiar to the technology—it is the perennial business of managing people through change. The first of five essays on what the diagnosis gets right, and what it conveniently overlooks.
Free to read
The Officer of Last Resort
An executive search brief gets the diagnosis right: the constraint on value is not technical. Then it advertises a vacancy. The authority to prioritise, to fund, and to stop already sits with someone. Creating a post rather than confronting an incumbent is a governance evasion.
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