Category: Corporate Culture
Why Visible Technology Leaders Build More Trust Than Silent Ones
1. The Corporate Voice Is Losing Credibility A strange thing is happening in executive communication. The more polished it becomes, the less believable it feels. For years, large organizations trained executives to communicate through multiple layers of lawyers, communications teams, governance forums, media handlers, and reputation specialists. Every statement became progressively safer, flatter, and more […]
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The Antidote: How to Be Kind, Be Funny, and Still Tell the Truth
Or: What to do after you have spent years writing posts that scare people. There is a pattern in my writing that I have only recently started to see clearly. The Handoff post was about how leaders abdicate. The 10 Nil post was about a team getting thrashed and not knowing why. The heckling post […]
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The Leadership Handoff: How Learned Helplessness And Management Bottlenecks Are Slowing AI Era Organizations
1. The Rugby Lesson Most People Learn the Hard Way If you have ever played rugby, you learn very quickly what a handoff is. You approach a player too high, too upright, or too casually, and suddenly there is a massive palm in your face while your dignity disappears backwards across the grass. The handoff […]
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The Full Context Product: How Agentic AI Redefines the Relationship Between Teams and the Software They Own
A variation on the dark factory thesis. Humans remain, humans are accountable, and what changes is everything else. 1. The Team That Memory Built There is a certain kind of organisational structure that forms not by design but by accumulated necessity. Take a low code onboarding system. It changes twice a year. It breaks twice […]
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Why Protecting People from Hard Feedback Makes Them Weaker
Leadership · Culture · Strategy | Andrew Baker | May 2026 | 14 min read There is a distinction that almost nobody in corporate life is willing to draw clearly, and the evasion of it costs organisations more than most technology failures ever will. The distinction is between unkind and cruel, and the confusion between […]
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The Courage to Be Honest: Why Giving Hard Feedback Is the Kindest Thing a Leader Can Do
Leadership · Technology · Strategy | Andrew Baker | May 2026 | 12 min read There is a diagram I keep coming back to. It is deceptively simple: two lines, two colours, one axis of time and one of system health. The blue line, labelled Unkind Truth, dips before it rises. Every truth telling moment […]
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The 10 Nil Paradigm: Why Your 8 Hour Outage Isn’t a “Blip”
1. Who Farted? If someone farts in a meeting room, everyone notices immediately. It is uncomfortable, distracting, and changes the entire atmosphere, yet strangely nobody wants to address it directly. People glance at each other, suppress reactions, maybe make a weak joke, and then carry on as if nothing really happened, even though everyone knows […]
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I Have Two Outlooks on a NASA Spacecraft and Neither Works
1. Ground Control to Major Redmond In early April 2026, four astronauts aboard the Orion spacecraft radioed Mission Control. They were travelling at over four thousand miles per hour, more than thirty thousand miles from Earth, on NASA’s first crewed lunar mission in more than fifty years. The hardware that got them there represents the […]
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Why We Industrialised the Leadership Vacuum
How we built a global machine to produce administrators, handed them leadership titles, and convinced ourselves that was enough We have built business schools, certification programmes, corporate development curricula and entire consulting industries around the premise that leadership can be systematised, credentialled and scaled. We have invested billions in the proposition. And the returns are […]
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The Message Mangler: Why Leaders Make Decisions on Fiction
There’s a silent killer sitting in most large organisations. It doesn’t appear on any risk register, it doesn’t show up in your sprint velocity charts, and it certainly won’t announce itself in your next all-hands. It operates quietly, in the gap between what actually happened and what gets reported upward. Meet the Message Mangler. 1. […]
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