Essays on the intellectual currents that influence how we think and work: philosophy, culture, language, and the often-unexamined ideas that structure everyday decisions.
93 essays
Margaret Mead argued for keeping Santa as myth, not deception—preserving wonder while nurturing critical thinking. Treating Santa as symbolic and drawing on diverse traditions fosters imagination, honesty, and cultural insight.
Narrow Band Comprehension limits individual and organisational performance through selective understanding. Organisations can counter it by promoting broad engagement, holistic metrics, and governance-based accountability.
Advances in LLMs show promise, but token bias undermines their logical reliability. Small input shifts can distort outputs, posing risks in fields like medicine, law, and policy. Their dependence on pattern recognition over true reasoning demands closer scrutiny and better design.
A custodian mindset in management prioritises stewardship over control. It supports autonomy, ethical leadership, sustainable resources, and agility through empowerment, transparency, learning, and clear ethical frameworks.
In workplaces that reward busyness, activity often replaces real productivity. Non-essential work drives exhaustion, not value. Time boxing, prioritisation, and delegation help refocus effort on meaningful work, improving effectiveness, creativity, and well-being.
“They don’t know what they don’t know” captures a core leadership risk. Unaware managers make poor decisions and damage morale. Organisations that embrace learning, critical thinking, and ethical judgment build more resilient and just systems.
Critical thinking is vital but demanding. It isn’t fixed; it’s built through practice. Time for deep thought, less multitasking, patience, writing, and wide reading sharpen judgment, creativity, and the development of original, valuable ideas.
The first in a series on learning from history and its value for organisational decision-making. Today, those who draw lessons from the past risk being labelled “on the wrong side of history,” much as dissenters in business face exile for challenging dominant narratives.
A fixed mindset breeds stagnation and toxicity; a growth mindset supports learning, collaboration, and innovation. But it isn’t blind optimism or effort alone. Real growth requires self-awareness, discipline, and balancing the fixed and growth impulses within us.
Reframing so-called “negative” people as pragmatists exposes unchecked optimism as a driver of the sunk cost fallacy—loss aversion, ego, and false hope. Drop the Kool-Aid, face reality, and better decisions come into view.
When managers fall into the sunk cost fallacy, more data rarely helps because the problem is emotional, not rational. Biases like ego, loss aversion, and optimism drive persistence. Awareness, governance, and decisive leadership matter more than analysis alone.
Ever get the sense that the meeting you are in is more about appearances than actions? Find that people keep on raising decision items that were already settled? Notice irrelevant issues dominate the agenda? Quite possibly an aspiring CIA operative is sabotaging your meeting.
Informal leadership works best through small, closed ties of three people, combining trust and task focus. When ties are only bilateral or too numerous, informal leadership weakens and can undermine organisational effectiveness.
Hierarchy itself doesn’t harm performance; knowledge hoarding does. Teams can thrive with deep hierarchies if information flows openly. When managers hide knowledge or deflect with “above your pay grade,” performance and culture quickly erode.
The challenges in creating psychological safety are in some ways more complex for managers because they not only need to lead the process, but also lead themselves in the initiation of the process.