Most leadership content is fluent, optimistic, and strangely bloodless. It speaks as though organisations are run by intentions rather than trade-offs; as though "culture" is a lever; as though authority is a mood. It can sound impressive, even confidence inspiring. But in reality it changes very little.
On the Subject of Leadership was created to fix that.
It is a long-form podcast for people who want to think more clearly about how authority, judgment, and influence actually work when the pressure is on. Not in the seminar room. Not in the glossy case study. In the place where a deadline bites, incentives clash, and someone must decide.
I am using the podcast to do two things at once.
First, to bring the best of my research and advisory work into a form you can actually use. Over the past two decades, I have sat close enough to strategy and governance to see the chasm between formal structures and lived reality: what boards think they are delegating what executives think they are deciding and what teams actually do to keep the organisation moving. That proximity made me sceptical in a useful way. It taught me that titles do not guarantee competence, that process does not guarantee judgment, and that "alignment" is often just a polite word for compliance.
Second, I am using that research as a map of meaning to travel deep into the stories from genuinely capable leaders. Not celebrity leadership. Not leadership as branding. The people I will be speaking with are those who have carried the weight of consequence: founders who built organisations under constraint; executives who learned the hard way what cannot be delegated; chairs who have watched a room turn from confident to confused because the evidence was thinner than the prose.
The podcast is, in effect, a field series: lived examples anchored by a research spine.
One reason for that spine is simple: leadership talk too easily collapses into what sounds inspiring. But the real test is not eloquence but function. Does this way of speaking and thinking actually help someone choose, coordinate, and act?
If that sounds abstract, it becomes painfully concrete the moment you've watched a leader use words to avoid responsibility: the euphemisms, the "we're still exploring", the indefinite verbs that conceal a decision already made. Under pressure, bad language is not merely annoying; it is organisationally expensive. It hides trade-offs, inflames politics, and destroys trust precisely when trust is most needed.
Another part of the spine is strategy. Not strategy as aspiration, but strategy as choice and constraint. There is a hard and unfashionable idea here: strategy is not "doing better"; it is choosing what not to do, and building a coherent system of activities that makes those choices real. The logic is simple enough to say in one sentence and effective enough to live with for a decade or more.
This matters for leadership because most coordination failures are, at root, failures of choice. Someone wants the benefits of two incompatible positions. Someone refuses to disappoint a constituency. Someone tries to protect optionality at the cost of coherence. You end up with drift disguised as agility.
So the podcast sits at that intersection: language and choice; authority and coordination; responsibility and trade-offs. The episodes are conversations, but the through-line is analytic.
The first episode features Chris McGowan, founder and CEO of ThunderLabs.
Before starting ThunderLabs, Chris spent years inside the recruitment industry, observing organisations up close: how decisions are really made, where coordination breaks down, and what happens when hierarchy replaces thinking. Recruitment is a revealing vantage point. It is where organisations tell the truth about themselves, often without intending to.
ThunderLabs is deliberately unconventional. There are no general managers and no traditional executive layers. Instead, the company runs on informal leadership, high-trust expertise, and people stepping across boundaries when the work demands it.
In our conversation, we unpack:
- what actually replaces managers when you remove them (and what does not)
- how informal leadership avoids turning into politics, favour-trading, or quiet sabotage
- why recruitment becomes a make-or-break decision in high-autonomy organisations
- the types of people who thrive in these systems—and those who don't
- what leaders inside conventional hierarchies can apply immediately, without flattening the org chart or launching a re-org as theatre
This episode is not an argument for "flat" organisations, nor is it an exercise in trend-chasing. Titles can be useful. Structure can be merciful. The question is whether structure is doing real work—clarifying accountability, enabling decisions, matching authority to competence—or whether it is merely distributing comfort.
What I value in Chris's story is that it forces the practical questions. If you remove layers, what absorbs the slack? If you rely on expertise, how do you prevent expertise from becoming unchallengeable power? If you push authority down to doers, how do you stop decisions from dissolving into endless consultation?
These are not ideological questions. They are engineering questions for human systems.
Finally, here is the invitation—and the ask.
The podcast is now live. Subscribe, listen to the Chris McGowan episode, and if it sharpens your thinking, share it with one person who is tired of leadership theatre and ready for the honest work.
Good night, and good luck.
