Most directors believe they want candour from their CEO. Most CEOs believe they provide it. Both are usually wrong. What Thucydides understood about Pericles, and what the research on boardroom silence confirms, explains why the gap between what is said and what is true keeps widening.
Organisations say they hire the best people. Too often, they hire the best proxies—credentials, categories, diagnoses—and never assess the person sitting in front of them. The filing system is satisfied. The organisation is not.
What happens when a leader who sold the vision steps back into the reality of delivering it?
In this episode of On the Subject of Leadership, I speak with Craig
Organisations keep buying $200 hammers and handing them to people who have never built anything more demanding than a flat-pack bookshelf. The problem is never the quality of the hire. It is the quality of the context into which the hire is placed.
Boards are not designed to choose between oversight and collaboration—they are designed to hold both in productive tension. Polarity mapping offers directors a discipline for governing without drifting.
March’s essays converge on a simple truth: leadership is less about solving problems than managing enduring tensions. From strategy to governance, the task is not to choose sides, but to exercise judgement—resisting the drift toward process, theatre, and easy answers.
Control and empowerment are often performed rather than designed. In this piece I examine how organisations drift into theatre—adding process or slogans instead of clarity—and argue for bounded empowerment: clear guardrails, explicit decision rights, and real autonomy within limits.
What happens when a movement built on autonomy becomes a system of rituals?
In this episode of On the Subject of Leadership, I speak with Martin Kearns—one of the
Standardisation and innovation are not competing choices but a polarity. In article four of this series I show how over-rotating to either creates failure, and how leaders can design systems, signals, and guardrails that allow both to coexist and scale.
The recurring fight between governance and autonomy is rarely a problem to solve. It is a polarity to manage. Left unexamined, organisations swing between freedom and control. The task is to design rhythms, guardrails, and signals that keep both working together.
Polarity mapping turns vague “both/and” thinking into a disciplined method. When leaders can map the upsides and downsides of competing poles, identify early warning signs, and design actions that sustain the benefits of each without tipping into failure, they build stronger organisations.
There is no shortage of companies claiming to be purpose-led. What is rarer is a business where purpose actually constrains decisions.
Abdullah Ramay, CEO of Pablo & Rusty's
