Everything published, most recent first.
An executive search brief gets the diagnosis right: the constraint on value is not technical. Then it advertises a vacancy. The authority to prioritise, to fund, and to stop already sits with someone. Creating a post rather than confronting an incumbent is a governance evasion.
Australia already has the machinery for real accountability—Hayne's findings, the Financial Accountability Regime's own published design, et al. What it lacks is the will to switch it on, because the people who can are the very people it would bind. On the law we possess but struggle to use.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.