Topics
Articles organised by theme, exploring leadership, governance, strategy, and organisational life. A place to follow ideas across time, trace recurring arguments, and explore the work by topic rather than chronology.
Leadership
On judgement, authority, and the exercise of leadership—as distinct from management, and rarely as tidy as the literature pretends.
Governance
Writing on boards, accountability, decision-making, and institutional design, with a focus on how governance either sustains or corrodes organisational legitimacy over time. Meant to catch what leadership alone won't.
Skin in the Game Is Now the Law, Yet Nothing Has Changed
The Chair's Dilemma: When the Board Becomes the Problem
The Problem With Telling Your Board What They Want to Hear
The Board: Polarities and the Role of the Director
Who Guards the Guardians?
Management
On the daily, unglamorous work but vitally important work of managing people—a discipline in its own right, not a consolation prize for those who didn't make leadership.
Organisations
On how organisations are built, changed, and quietly undone by their own structure.
Strategy
On strategy as decision under constraint—and its frequent collapse into platitude.
Ethics
On the ethical dimension of organisational life, where most decisions are made long before anyone gets around to calling them moral.
Philosophy
On the philosophical inheritance—classical and modern—that most leadership, management, and organisational writing skips.
History
On history read for what it still has to say about power, judgement, and institutions.
Politics
On politics, government, and the institutions of public life.
2025 in Review: Authority, Attention, and the Return of Coherence
When Messaging Slips the Bonds of Reality
Why Hype Erodes Communication
Using Outrage as a Negotiation Tactic
Authoritarian, Authoritative, and Populist Leadership: A Short Comparative Analysis
Psychology
On how people actually think and behave, as distinct from how organisational theory assumes they do.
Technology
On technology, AI, and the gap between what a tool promises and what an organisation actually does with it.
Artificial Intelligence
On artificial intelligence—not as novelty, but as the old failures of leadership and judgement conducted at unprecedented speed and expense.
Academic
On the discipline of scholarship itself—reading, writing, sourcing, and the difference between the two.