The fraud doesn't end at appointment—it must be maintained. The people best placed to name it are the people whose interests depend on not naming it. Part two of two on who keeps the corporate con moving, and the one question that stops it.
Boards keep hiring the executive who says yes. An entire market—search, remuneration, coaching, consulting—now manufactures the corporate saviour and has no mechanism for telling the truth about what he can deliver. Part one of two on the fraud that begins at appointment.
Most conversations about artificial intelligence and the product manager begin by asking whether the role survives. This one begins somewhere more useful: by asking what the role was ever actually
Part IV of a IV part series. The organisations capturing real value from AI are not better at AI; they are better at running organisations. The specific moves boards and executives can make to join them—and why nine years of evidence says most will not.
Part III of a IV part series: thirty-four per cent of organisations claim to be deeply transforming with AI. Eighty-four per cent admit no jobs have been redesigned. These two findings cannot both be true in any operationally meaningful sense. One of them is theatre.
A double issue. April and May kept returning to one move: swapping something legible—a competency grid, a diagnosis, a silver-bullet hire, a perpetual pilot—for the harder work of judgement. The task is always to weigh the particular case, not reach for the proxy that spares the weighing.
In this episode of On the Subject of Leadership, I speak with Clare Kitching, founder of Cambiq Consulting—formerly of McKinsey, QuantumBlack, and Treasury Wine Estates where she served as
Part II of a IV part series: twenty-five per cent of organisations have moved AI experiments into production after nine years of trying. Fifty-four per cent expect to within three to six months—a prediction that has appeared in every major survey for nearly a decade.
Part I of a IV part series: for nine years surveys have produced a remarkably similar finding: a small minority of organisations capture real financial value from AI; the great majority spend, signal, and pilot.
What does it actually take for a strategic intent to survive contact with the business that must implement it?
In this episode of On the Subject of Leadership, I speak
The disruption industry treats breaking things as proof of seriousness. Edmund Burke—reformer, not reactionary—offered a corrective two centuries ago: most transformation programmes destroy more than they build. The best leaders renovate, not demolish.
When the board itself becomes the obstacle to clear thinking, no governance code can save the company. On groupthink, pluralistic ignorance, and the difference between directors who serve the company and those who merely sit on its board.
