My guest this week is Tim Newbold, founder of OKR Quickstart, who has spent a decade watching goal-setting frameworks meet real organisations, and who argues that when they fail, the fault is almost never in the framework.
On the Subject of LeadershipThe remedy for a shortage of judgement is not a course in judgement. It is to rebuild the conditions in which judgement is exercised—and to pay the political price of doing so.
Across seventy-five minutes on OKRs, my guest never once blamed the instrument. On Drucker's forgotten half-phrase, the decisions nobody takes, the arithmetic of slack, and why a target for missing targets is still a target.
Organisations substitute legible proxies for the unglamorous work of judgement. That single swap produces both the “saviour” they should not have hired and the wasted talent they did. Topics tell you what a piece is about; arguments take you on the journey.
One pathology, two symptoms: the manufactured saviour and the wasted artisan.
3 essays IIOrganisations do not assess the person in front of them; they assess the proxy, and the proxy is always cheaper, safer, and often as not—wrong.
13 essays IIIThe people positioned to say the unwelcome thing are systematically disciplined out of saying it—and the disciplining never appears in any meeting minute.
13 essays IVWhen words stop carrying consequences, people stop being accountable for what they say, and then for what they do.
6 essays VAI is not a new failure; it is the old failure—signalling over substance, acquisition over capacity—conducted at unprecedented speed and expense.
18 essays VIThe artisan, not the tool, builds the house—and artisanship is a profession, not a side hustle for the technically gifted.
7 essays VIIThe proxy does not stop at the hiring panel: busyness passes for work, the metric for the mission, the forecast for judgement—and every such failure begins in a single mind.
20 essays VIIIThe slow, unglamorous, compounding work that the saviour was hired to spare everyone having to do—yet the only thing that was ever going to work.
18 essaysThe conversations that shape organisations usually happen behind closed doors. These are held out loud—on leadership, management, and governance, as they are actually discussed.
My guest this week is Tim Newbold, founder of OKR Quickstart, who has spent a decade watching goal-setting frameworks meet real organisations, and who argues that when they fail, the fault is almost never in the framework.
Wednesday 7 October 2026My guest this week is Pamela Wyatt, Head of Business Transformation for Asia-Pacific at DT Global, who spent nearly a decade at the Asian Development Bank negotiating governance reform with Pacific governments.
Wednesday 9 September 2026My guest this week is Professor Alistair Noble, President of Nan Tien Institute, a small independent higher education provider near Wollongong grounded in Buddhist values.
Wednesday 26 August 2026A new essay every Monday, and the podcast’s written companion every Thursday.
Some organisations do not merely fail to develop judgement in the people they appoint. They select against it—and in a culture where everyone first-names the chief executive, the selection is almost invisible.
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