On judgement, authority, and the exercise of leadership—as distinct from management, and rarely as tidy as the literature pretends.
79 essays
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.
Most conversations about artificial intelligence and the product manager begin by asking whether the role survives. This one begins somewhere more useful: by asking what the role was ever actually
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.
In this episode of On the Subject of Leadership, I speak with Clare Kitching, founder of Cambiq Consulting—formerly of McKinsey, QuantumBlack, and Treasury Wine Estates where she served as
What does it actually take for a strategic intent to survive contact with the business that must implement it? In this episode of On the Subject of Leadership, I speak
What happens when the people charged with fixing an organisation are, in important respects, the architects of its current condition? In this episode of On the Subject of Leadership, I
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.
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
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.
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.
What happens when a movement built on autonomy becomes a system of rituals? In this episode of On the Subject of Leadership, I speak with Martin Kearns—one of the
What separates a commitment from a preference? A preference is what an organisation would like to do. A commitment is what it has arranged to be unable to stop doing.