Dr Winter writes on leadership, governance, and the conditions that determine whether either is practised well. His work draws on classical sources, organisational scholarship, and two decades inside the institutions he writes about.
Every serious corporate failure of the past two decades has been examined, in retrospect, by people who found the frameworks in good order. The risk register existed. The policy was
Most conversations about corporate governance begin with structure—committees, charters, the machinery of oversight. This one begins on the side of a dirt road in Nepal in 1999, and I
The demand to measure the return on our ethics is not a problem to be solved but a symptom to be read. On why pricing virtue corrupts it—and why a firm that can measure the return on its integrity has already begun to spend it.
Generative AI has made plausible ideas nearly free, and a fashionable argument says this changes everything. It doesn't. Ideas were never scarce—judgement was, and remains so. On Grub Street at industrial scale, AI slop, and the only mile that was ever hard.
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.
