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 LeadershipSome 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.
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 harder work of judgement. Eight arguments follow from that, and every essay advances one.
The 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.
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.
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.
26 August 2026A new essay every Monday, and the podcast’s written companion every Thursday.
An agent, in law and in the older political vocabulary, is someone who exercises judgement on another's behalf and answers for having exercised it. The systems we have agreed to call agents can do the first and not the second, and the evidence on what that costs has started to arrive.
Everything here is written by one person, referenced properly, and answerable to the reader rather than to an advertiser. The tiers reflect how much of the working you want to see.
Open to anyone who arrives.
Free, by email. The greater part of the writing.
For readers who'd rather sustain the work than merely follow it.
