On how organisations are built, changed, and quietly undone by their own structure.
133 essays
Across seventy-five minutes on OKRs, my guest never once blamed the instrument. On Drucker's forgotten half-phrase, the decisions nobody takes, the arithmetic of slack, and why a target for missing targets is still a target.
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.
Some organisations do not merely fail to develop judgement in the people they appoint. They select against it—and in a culture where everyone first-names the chief executive, the selection is almost invisible.
Pamela Wyatt says the outsider's job is to adapt, not impose. Then she describes overruling a seating convention, redesigning a room over its users' objections, and building a board pipeline where none existed. The exception is the argument.
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.
The person who takes on eight things and ruins all eight is following a specification, not indulging a personality. Organisations grow the arms themselves, because busyness is legible and judgement is not.
Asked to choose between discipline and judgement, David Harvie had just spent an hour describing his disciplines. He chose judgement anyway. On a system that worked exactly as designed, what it cost the people it promoted, and why he has rebuilt a gentler version of it.
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.
I can audit a model's output on leadership and must take its tax advice on faith. That asymmetry is the whole problem, and it is not psychological. The third essay in the Prior Obligations series argues that AI does not deskill the competent—it unmasks the fake.
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.
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.
Organisations say they hire the best people. Too often, they hire the best proxies—credentials, categories, diagnoses—and never assess the person sitting in front of them. The filing system is satisfied. The organisation is not.
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
Standardisation and innovation are not competing choices but a polarity. In article four of this series I show how over-rotating to either creates failure, and how leaders can design systems, signals, and guardrails that allow both to coexist and scale.