The Falcon's Club

About this conversation

Every incentive system that fails is easy to criticise. The difficult ones are those that work.

In the late 1990s David Harvie sold for a firm that ran its Sydney floor as a concentric ring: new arrivals on the outside, moving inward as they succeeded, progressing through a hierarchy of birds toward the falcon. Individual numbers went up twice a day, visible to everyone. He reached the top tier and was flown to New York. He also, some time later, found himself unable to get out of bed. Asked to render a verdict on the system, he does not hedge: it worked.

This conversation follows what a person does with that experience. Harvie is Director of Wholesale Distribution at AUSIEX, and has built a health venture for time-poor fathers alongside it. He and I studied leadership philosophy together as postgraduates, which makes him one of the few people I can ask which of those philosophies survived contact with a target — and which quietly died.

In this conversation

• Authority conferred by rank is not the same currency as authority granted by the governed, and the two are not interchangeable
• An incentive system can succeed completely and still exact a cost its designers never measured
• The disciplines a leader keeps in private are not private; employees and children are both watching the actions
• Standards written by the people who must live under them outlast standards handed down — including when those people are five years old
• The obstacle to a fuller life is rarely time and usually priority, though that claim is easier to make from some positions than others
• Discipline is a mechanism; judgement is the context in which the mechanism is pointed at something

Further reading

• LinkedIn
• DADBODZ
• Nexus Holistic Health

The guest

David Harvie has spent close to three decades in Australian financial services, from stockbroking floors to direct sales leadership. Alongside that career he founded a health venture for time-poor fathers and co-founded a telehealth business. He writes and thinks about self-command as the precondition of leading anyone else.

Judgement, Not Discipline

Asked to choose between discipline and judgement, David Harvie had just spent an hour describing his disciplines. He chose judgement anyway. On a system that worked exactly as designed, what it cost the people it promoted, and why he has rebuilt a gentler version of it.

Dr Robert N. WinterDr Robert N. Winter