On judgement, authority, and the exercise of leadership—as distinct from management, and rarely as tidy as the literature pretends.
My guest this week is Tim Newbold, founder of OKR Quickstart, who has spent a decade watching goal-setting frameworks meet real organisations, and who argues that when they fail, the fault is almost never in the framework.
My guest this week is Pamela Wyatt, Head of Business Transformation for Asia-Pacific at DT Global, who spent nearly a decade at the Asian Development Bank negotiating governance reform with Pacific governments.
My guest this week is Professor Alistair Noble, President of Nan Tien Institute, a small independent higher education provider near Wollongong grounded in Buddhist values.
My guest this week is David Harvie, Director of Wholesale Distribution at AUSIEX, a wholesale broker serving financial advisers and institutions, and the founder of DADBODZ, a health venture for time-poor fathers.
My guest this week is Jay Fontanini, founder of the AI Executive Accelerator, who spent three decades in property and casualty insurance before turning to building software and teaching executives to think with it rather than perform having thought.
There is a familiar shape to the discussion of artificial intelligence in Australian enterprises. Adoption figures rise. Pilot counts rise. Licence spend rises. Somewhere in the annual report a paragraph
The leadership literature, and the organisations that consume it, share an unexamined assumption about direction. Progress means ascent. One begins as an individual contributor, demonstrates competence, and is rewarded with
Most conversations about corporate governance begin with structure—committees, charters, the machinery of oversight. This one begins on the side of a dirt road in Nepal in 1999, and I
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
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
People accountable to a superior whose views they know tend to adopt those views. Nick Hassett on how accountability cultures manufacture silos, why agreement stops at the boardroom door, and why banning AI hides the risk rather than removing it.
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
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.
Flat organisations are usually presented as a philosophy. More often they are a headcount. The literature on networked teams and post-hierarchical work is written, almost without exception, from firms
There is a familiar shape to the discussion of artificial intelligence in Australian enterprises. Adoption figures rise. Pilot counts rise. Licence spend rises. Somewhere in the annual report a paragraph
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.
The leadership literature, and the organisations that consume it, share an unexamined assumption about direction. Progress means ascent. One begins as an individual contributor, demonstrates competence, and is rewarded with
Most conversations about corporate governance begin with structure—committees, charters, the machinery of oversight. This one begins on the side of a dirt road in Nepal in 1999, and I
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
Accountability owed to a known superior, and imposed after the fact, produces conformity and self-justification. Agreement in the boardroom fares little better; only a measure of success set in advance escapes both.
People accountable to a superior whose views they know tend to adopt those views. Nick Hassett on how accountability cultures manufacture silos, why agreement stops at the boardroom door, and why banning AI hides the risk rather than removing it.
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.
