Arguments
Organisations substitute legible proxies for the unglamorous work of judgement. That single swap produces both the saviour they should not have hired and the wasted talent they did. Topics tell you what a piece is about; arguments tell you what it claims.
The Saviour and the Hammer
3 essaysOne pathology, two symptoms: the manufactured saviour and the wasted artisan.
The Aperture
13 essaysOrganisations do not assess the person in front of them; they assess the proxy, and the proxy is always cheaper, safer, and often as not—wrong.
- Teflon Leadership
- Questions for a Future Employer
- The Difficulty of Identifying Potential
- Stacking Experience
- The Lost Art of Finding Talent
- Signals vs Substance in the Hiring Process
- The Talent Aperture, Reopened
- Your Job Title Is the Ceiling They Hand You, Your Capability Is the Skylight You Cut
- The Creator vs. the Passenger: Rethinking Recruitment in Charities
- Lessons from Bach: Rethinking Modern Hiring Practices
- The Person in Front of You: On the Quiet Tyranny of the Proxy Interview
- The Case Against Leadership Competency Models
- What a Certificate Actually Certifies
The Guardians
13 essaysThe people positioned to say the unwelcome thing are systematically disciplined out of saying it—and the disciplining never appears in any minute.
- A Psychological Safety Primer
- Leading Psychological Safety in Teams
- Beyond Consensus Decision Making
- Silence in Organisational Behaviour
- Governance in Name Only (GINO)
- Conscience, Cynicism, and the Cultivation of Toxicity in Organisations
- Bullies, Bosses, and Being Manipulated
- Who Guards the Guardians?
- Stop Trying to Solve Every Tension: Some Are Polarities to Manage
- The Board: Polarities and the Role of the Director
- The Problem With Telling Your Board What They Want to Hear
- The Chair's Dilemma: When the Board Becomes the Problem
- Selected for Silence
The Theatre
6 essaysWhen words stop carrying consequences, executives stop being accountable for what they say, and then for what they do.
The Permanent Pilot
18 essaysAI is not a new failure; it is the old failure—signalling over substance, acquisition over capacity—conducted at unprecedented expense.
- Leading AI-First Organisations
- AI Sycophants: How To Stop Your Model From Kissing Up
- AI Is Changing the Structure of Organisations, The Future Is a Rhomboid
- Trust in the Age of the Machine
- Authorship in the Age of AI
- The Missing Middle in Enterprise AI
- An Eight-Part Playbook for Human-Centred AI
- The Chat Trap: When AI Makes Your Thinking Softer
- How to Use AI as a Thinking Partner Without Letting It Think For You
- Nine Years, One Number
- The Permanent Pilot
- The Theatre of Transformation
- The Books That Don't Balance
- The Old Complaint in New Clothes
- The Score
- The Verification Asymmetry
- One Rule for the Deck, Another for the Bridge
- Raising the Sea Level
The Artisan
7 essaysThe artisan, not the instrument, builds the house—and artisanship is a profession, not a side hustle for the technically gifted.
- The Pitfalls of Rewarding Effort in Organisational Behaviour
- Managing People Isn’t a Side Hustle: Time to Re-Professionalise Management
- A Delicate Dance of Trust and Openness
- A Six-Move Playbook for Managers Who Need Truth and Traction
- Giving Bad News, Badly
- The Appointment and the Fortnight
- The Instrument Is Rarely Blamed
The Proxy Mind
20 essaysSelection precedes analysis; the scarce executive skill in an era of cheap generation is deciding what does not deserve to shape judgement.
- A Crisp Document and Messy Meeting
- A Fallacy of Resourcing
- Calling Time on Sunk Costs
- Why Positioning Eats Predicting For Breakfast
- Being Right A Lot: An Inputs Approach
- "This Time It Will Be Different": A Costly Delusion
- The Trouble with Busyness
- The Limitations of AI in Formal Reasoning
- Narrow Band Comprehension: Understanding Myopia in Performance and Governance
- The Problem with Measurement in Organisations
- Better Writing Leads to Improved Credibility
- The Art of Not Reading
- Why Great Managers Know When to Switch Doors
- No-Click Reading: How AI Summaries Starve Critical Thinking
- Why Trust Matters More Than Data in Decision-Making
- Which Humans? Whose Values? The Cultural Biases of AI
- Authorship in the Age of AI
- Critical Ignoring: The Executive Discipline That Makes Strategy Possible
- The Cocktopus Problem: Eight Arms, No Judgement
- The Agent That Cannot Answer
Building the House
18 essaysThe slow, unglamorous, compounding work that the saviour was hired to spare everyone—and the only thing that was ever going to work.
- Mental Health As A Strategic Issue
- Recovering From The Great Attrition
- A Challenging Time for Talent Management
- Minding the Capability Gap
- Remote Working Policies
- Innovation, a Driver of Success?
- A Guide to Succession Planning in Organisations: Part 1
- A Guide to Succession Planning in Organisations: Part 2
- A Guide to Succession Planning in Organisations: Part 3
- The Blank Slate Approach to Organisational Management
- Strategic People Architecture
- Shinise, as a Concept of Organisational Renewal
- How to Build a Polarity Map
- Balancing Governance and Autonomy: The Polarity That Breaks Transformations (and How to Manage It)
- Standardisation and Innovation: the Polarity that Decides whether You Can Scale
- Central Control and Team Empowerment: The Polarity Leaders Keep Misdiagnosing
- Move Slow and Fix Things
- Rebuilding the Room