Leadership & Management - Dr Robert N. Winter

The Emperor's Tailors

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.

By Dr Robert N. Winter

/ 22 Jun 2026

In Gerrit Dou's painting a mountebank on a draped platform hawks remedies to an attentive town-square crowd, while the painter looks on from a window above.

The Saviour-Industrial Complex

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.

By Dr Robert N. Winter

/ 15 Jun 2026

A crowd dances in worship around a golden calf raised on a plinth in Poussin's painting; a robed figure presides at the altar while the bearer of bad news stays offstage.

The Scribbler: Judgement and Its Counterfeits

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.

By Dr Robert N. Winter

/ 31 May 2026

The Scribbler: Judgement and Its Counterfeits

Move Slow and Fix Things

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.

By Dr Robert N. Winter

/ 11 May 2026

The Louvre's Grande Galerie imagined as ruins—broken columns and shattered vaults open to the sky, a tall bronze statue still standing, figures examining sculpture fragments on the floor.

The Chair's Dilemma: When the Board Becomes the Problem

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.

By Dr Robert N. Winter

/ 4 May 2026

Scene of five Dutch cloth guild syndics seated around a red-covered table with an open ledger, each man's face individuated, one half-risen as if interrupted mid-discussion.

The Case Against Leadership Competency Models

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.

By Dr Robert N. Winter

/ 27 Apr 2026

Magritte's surrealist painting of a brown smoking pipe rendered in precise detail against a beige background, with the French caption "Ceci n'est pas une pipe"—"This is not a pipe."

The Problem With Telling Your Board What They Want to Hear

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.

By Dr Robert N. Winter

/ 20 Apr 2026

The Problem With Telling Your Board What They Want to Hear

Podcast

Craig Baker: Leadership at the Point of Contact

What happens when a leader who sold the vision steps back into the reality of delivering it? In this episode of On the Subject of Leadership, I speak with Craig

By Dr Robert N. Winter

/ 15 Apr 2026

Craig Baker: Leadership at the Point of Contact

Hiring a $200 Hammer

Organisations keep buying $200 hammers and handing them to people who have never built anything more demanding than a flat-pack bookshelf. The problem is never the quality of the hire. It is the quality of the context into which the hire is placed.

By Dr Robert N. Winter

/ 13 Apr 2026

A blacksmith works molten iron by firelight while figures watch from the shadows. Skill and setting are inseparable; neither functions without the other.

The Board: Polarities and the Role of the Director

Boards are not designed to choose between oversight and collaboration—they are designed to hold both in productive tension. Polarity mapping offers directors a discipline for governing without drifting.

By Dr Robert N. Winter

/ 7 Apr 2026

Abstract painting of circles, triangles, arcs, and bold lines in dynamic equilibrium against a pale ground. No single element dominates the whole. Wassily Kandinsky, Composition VIII, 1923.

The Scribbler: When the Pendulum Becomes the Operating Model

March’s essays converge on a simple truth: leadership is less about solving problems than managing enduring tensions. From strategy to governance, the task is not to choose sides, but to exercise judgement—resisting the drift toward process, theatre, and easy answers.

By Dr Robert N. Winter

/ 1 Apr 2026

Painting of Socrates seated in prison, reaching for a cup of hemlock while gesturing upward, as grieving followers surround him; he remains calm and composed despite imminent execution.

Central Control and Team Empowerment: The Polarity Leaders Keep Misdiagnosing

Control and empowerment are often performed rather than designed. In this piece I examine how organisations drift into theatre—adding process or slogans instead of clarity—and argue for bounded empowerment: clear guardrails, explicit decision rights, and real autonomy within limits.

By Dr Robert N. Winter

/ 31 Mar 2026

Surreal scene of faceless mannequin figures and geometric forms in an empty piazza with long shadows and distant buildings, creating an eerie sense of order and stillness.