Category: Corporate Culture
Decision Debt: Why Good Teams Become Approval Factories
1. The Symptoms Come First Start with the experience rather than the diagnosis, because the diagnosis only lands once the pain is familiar. A feature that two people could decide in an afternoon now requires six, and none of them can say with certainty who actually owns the call. Nobody in the building can tell […]
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Corporate Productivity: The Hidden Cost of Too Many Meetings
Most professionals do not have a time management problem. They have a contact currency problem. The distinction matters enormously because one is a scheduling challenge while the other is a fundamental misallocation of the only cognitive resource that cannot be replenished or extended. They spend their days converting high bandwidth execution time into low yield […]
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Your Interview Process Is Cloning Your Weaknesses
Most organisations believe their interview process selects for leadership. It does not. It selects for the ability to perform leadership in a low stakes, well prepared, time limited conversation in front of a panel that has already decided what it wants to see. That is a different thing entirely, and confusing the two is costing […]
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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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