Organisations keep buying $200 hammers and handing them to people who have never built anything more demanding than a flat-pack bookshelf. The problem is never the quality of the hire. It is the quality of the context into which the hire is placed.
Articles examining the distinction between leading and managing, the limits of managerialism, and the conditions under which authority, judgement, and responsibility can be exercised well.
All in Leadership & Management
On the Subject of Leadership is a long-form podcast for people who carry responsibility. No slogans—just clear thinking on authority, judgment, coordination, and accountability under real constraints, through research-led conversations with founders and executives.
Writing on boards, accountability, decision-making, and institutional design, with a focus on how governance either sustains or corrodes organisational legitimacy over time.
All in Governance
Boards are not designed to choose between oversight and collaboration—they are designed to hold both in productive tension. Polarity mapping offers directors a discipline for governing without drifting.
Analysis of strategy, competition, and organisational coherence, drawing on classical strategy, contemporary practice, and scepticism toward fashionable frameworks.
All in Business & Strategy
Control and empowerment are often performed rather than designed. In this piece I examine how organisations drift into theatre—adding process or slogans instead of clarity—and argue for bounded empowerment: clear guardrails, explicit decision rights, and real autonomy within limits.
Reflections on power, institutions, and public life, exploring how political ideas shape—and are shaped by—social norms, incentives, and cultural assumptions.
All in Society & Politics
Margaret Mead argued for keeping Santa as myth, not deception—preserving wonder while nurturing critical thinking. Treating Santa as symbolic and drawing on diverse traditions fosters imagination, honesty, and cultural insight.
Essays on the intellectual currents that influence how we think and work: philosophy, culture, language, and the often-unexamined ideas that structure everyday decisions.
All in Ideas & Culture
Metacognition is the discipline of noticing—and revising—your thinking in real time. It sharpens judgement, steadies emotion, and turns debriefs and assumption checks into a practical system for better decisions.
Writing on technological change, scientific authority, and their organisational and social consequences—separating genuine progress from inflated promise.
All in Science & Technology
As Apple's privacy respecting posture gives way to the pull of marketing dollars through making user data the product, their third way begins to fall short.
Observations on writing, publishing, and the media ecosystem, including the economics of attention, the craft of authorship, and the changing conditions of public discourse.
All in Publishing & Media
The em-dash has fallen under suspicion—treated as a tell-tale sign of artificial writing rather than what it has always been: a mark of care, rhythm, and thought in motion. It should return to good standing so we can recover linguistic standards we seem oddly eager to abandon.
