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
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.
Durable advantage is built less on intensity than on cadence, habit, and protected attention. If you want to design routines that stick, reduce attention residue, limit false work, and turn standards into rhythms—read on.
On the Subject of Leadership is a long-form podcast for people who carry responsibility. No slogans—just clear thinking on authority, judgment, coordination, and accountability under real constraints, through research-led conversations with founders and executives.
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
Metacognition is the discipline of noticing—and revising—your thinking in real time. It sharpens judgement, steadies emotion, and turns debriefs and assumption checks into a practical system for better decisions.
A 2025 review of authority, trust, coherence and attention—plus a strategic outlook for 2026 on AI governance, provenance, regulation and decision quality. What to prioritise, what to ignore, and why clarity beats theatre.
A practical playbook for human-centred AI: redesigning workflows, building capability, governing judgment, and sustaining talent pipelines so AI amplifies human agency rather than hollowing out the organisation.
AI models often mirror our beliefs, rewarding us with agreeable but shallow answers. This sycophancy flatters rather than challenges, eroding judgment and candour. To gain true value, leaders must set incentives that favour truth over comfort, design prompts that demand trade-offs, and treat AI as a
Managing People Isnt a Side Hustle Time to Re Professionalise Management0:00/618.6721× A while back I mentored a gifted software engineer—let's call her Priya. Priya
Assuming others see you as ethical because you believe yourself to be is a critical leadership error. Ethical leadership requires visible modelling, intentional communication, and alignment between actions and values. Without this, leaders appear ethically neutral—creating distrust, disengagement, a
In their fear of missing the AI bandwagon, many boards are blindly investing in tech they barely understand—driven more by hype than strategy. Mimicry, not discernment, has become the default. The result? Strategic incoherence, wasted billions, and millions of people thrown unnecessarily out of work
