I am an independent writer, podcaster, and advisor with two decades of experience spanning publishing, health, national standards, and the for-purpose sector. My career has moved from network infrastructure to the boardroom and from programme delivery to cultural change—not as a progression of roles, but as successive encounters with the same underlying problem: organisations that are well-stocked with talent and poorly equipped to use it.
That problem is what I write and talk about. On the Subject of Leadership is my podcast—a series of extended conversations with the leaders, researchers, and practitioners who study and live these questions at close range. It is where theory meets the texture of actual institutional life, and where I get to ask the questions that management literature tends to answer too quickly—and management meetings tend to not answer.
That problem is also what I work on. I help organisations that are stuck—not in effort, but in effectiveness. Sometimes that means untangling OKRs from organisational theatre. Sometimes it means chairing a board through a legitimacy crisis, or building a capability framework that does not collapse under the weight of its own nomenclature.
I bring to that work a PhD in leadership, an MBA in organisational behaviour, and governance credentials from the AICD. I have held leadership roles at PRP Diagnostic Imaging, Standards Australia, and HarperCollins, and am the current chair of tekFoundation. But credentials describe preparation, not judgment—and judgment is what this work actually requires: knowing when to push, when to pause, and when to quietly reframe the conversation.
As a writer, I explore the forces that shape modern leadership and institutional life, with a preference for clarity over cant and a conviction that the Romans and the Elizabethans already solved most of the problems we keep discovering.
If your organisation needs fewer performances and more performance management—let's talk.
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.
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.
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.
Someone is promoted, moved sideways in a restructure, or hired in on the strength of a document. Within a quarter the gap is obvious and a fortnight's certification is bought to close it. The evidence says the first move was made on the wrong signal and the second is the weakest remedy available.
A certificate records that a person completed a defined process on a defined day. It does not record whether judgement was formed — and in most organisations, nobody is asking the second question, because the first one has tidied the file.