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.
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
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.
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
Australia already has the machinery for real accountability—Hayne's findings, the Financial Accountability Regime's own published design, et al. What it lacks is the will to switch it on, because the people who can are the very people it would bind. On the law we possess but struggle to use.
Analysis of strategy, competition, and organisational coherence, drawing on classical strategy, contemporary practice, and scepticism toward fashionable frameworks.
All in Business & Strategy
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.
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
The demand to measure the return on our ethics is not a problem to be solved but a symptom to be read. On why pricing virtue corrupts it—and why a firm that can measure the return on its integrity has already begun to spend it.
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.
