About Me

Philosopher and historian by training, Product Manager by pay cheque, and a doctoral candidate at Macquarie University researching Edmund Burke on authority and the implications for leadership.

Summary

A highly motivated senior manager with experience across businesses from start-ups to medium size corporations seeking change management. I have led diverse teams in challenging and ambiguous environments.

Experience

Standards Australia
Senior Product Manager: January 2021 – Present
To drive performance excellence including implementing and maintaining process and system efficiency and accuracy, performance monitoring and customer service excellence, aligned with Standards Australia’s Strategic Plan.

Child Development Institute
Operations Director: November 2019 – December 2020
To assist in achieving the operational objectives of the Child Development Institute and plan greenfield site development.

HarperCollins Publishers Australia
Data Solutions Manager: April 2013 – October 2019
Partner with internal divisions and external clients to develop and implement data transformation strategies, often involving tools and technology, process improvements, organisational restructures or business model considerations.

Education

Macquarie University
Doctor of Philosophy – Sydney, In Progress
Focus: Philosophy of Management (Leadership)

Macquarie University
Master of Research – Sydney, 2018
Focus: Philosophy of Management

Macquarie Graduate School of Management (MGSM)
Master of Business Administration – Sydney, 2017
Focus: Philosophy and Psychology of Management, Strategic Management, Organizational Behavior

Fiction

Any of the Sherlock Holmes Stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, though the novels The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Sign of Four are masterful

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

• The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes is a highly recommended edition for anyone wanting to know more about the historical setting of the stories

J. R. R. Tolkien

• The Hobbit
• The Lord of the Rings
• Beowulf

P. G. Wodehouse

• The Code of the Woosters
• Right Ho, Jeeves
• Leave It to Psmith

Oscar Wilde

• The Picture of Dorian Gray
• The Importance of Being Earnest

Stephen Fry

• The Hippopotamus

Non-Fiction

Niall Ferguson

• The War of the World
• The Square and the Tower
• Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe

Andrew Roberts

• Masters and Commanders
• Churchill

Steven Pinker

• The Language Instinct
• The Better Angels of Our Nature

Yuval Noah Harari

• Sapiens

Daniel Kahneman

• Thinking Fast and Slow

Tom Holland

• Dominion

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

• Incerto

Hannah Arendt

• Between Past and Future
• The Origins of Totalitarianism
• The Life of the Mind

Michael Burleigh

• Sacred Causes

Environment

While my privacy interests favour Linux, the practicalities of life necessitate pairing this with a Windows environment. My Windows PC is a home built desktop (AMD RYZEN Threadripper, Corsair Cooling, Nvidia GPU and plenty of RAM).

When using a Linux-based system, my current flavour is Pop!_OS with Typora for a focused writing environment, LibreOffice paired with Zotero for research projects, and Standard Notes for, well… notes.

Privacy

Perhaps it is a creeping presbyopia, in which life seemed to afford a greater privacy in the past. Perhaps it is an increasing awareness of the intrusive nature of advertising and data mining. Whatever the cause, I have become a strong privacy advocate and try, difficult though it is at times, to Restore Privacy… with some Privacy Tools it can be done.

Firefox for browsing – modified and tweaked for privacy

• Tor gets an honorable mention

DuckDuckGo for search

• Startpage gets an honourable mention

Signal for messaging

• Threema gets an honourable mention

ProtonMail for email

ProtonVPN for VPN

Tresorit for file storage

• NextCloud gets an honourable mention for those willing to manage their own service

Mastodon for social posting

• While I understand the pull of the world’s biggest social network, Stop Using Facebook has some compelling arguments if you haven’t seen them…

PixelFed for social imaging

PeerTube for video

WordPress for blogging

• Write.as gets an honorable mention

For those looking for a Google Docs / Office.com replacement and don’t want to manage a NextCloud instance: CryptPad has a great suite of tools.

Hosting

Hosting is provided by Infomaniak. They are a Swiss jurisdiction, privacy respecting, green hosting provider.

A Sovereign, Open and Healthy Web

This section is inspired by Ru Singh philosophy of an ‘Open and Healthy Web,’ Aral Balkan’s conceptualisation of the ‘Small Web,’ and the burgeoning IndieWeb project. The prime principles of which are:

Your content is yours

When you post something on the web, it should belong to you, not a corporation. Too many companies have gone out of business and lost all of their users’ data. By joining the IndieWeb, your content stays yours and in your control.

You are better connected

Your articles and status messages can go to all services, not just one, allowing you to engage with everyone. Even replies and likes on other services can come back to your site so they’re all in one place. 

You are in control

You can post anything you want, in any format you want, with no one monitoring you. In addition, you share simple readable links such as example.com/ideas. These links are permanent and will always work.

This represents a reform of the global digital network to promote the adoption of individually-owned and controlled sovereign spaces.