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.
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.
What happens when the people charged with fixing an organisation are, in important respects, the architects of its current condition?
In this episode of On the Subject of Leadership, I
Every organisation has one. Twelve boxes, each promising to reduce leadership to something measurable and trainable. The framework is everywhere—and it is wrong in a more fundamental sense than you might think.
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.
