Category: Corporate Culture
You Are Not a CIO. And That Is Fine.
Title inflation is not a strategy. It is a symptom. 1. Fifty chiefs There is a company somewhere right now with fifty people holding the title of Chief Information Officer, and the word chief, by any reasonable definition, implies a singular thing, a point of ownership where the decision stops moving around the room and […]
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Why Kindness Is the Most Important Quality in a Leader (And Without It, Nothing Else Works)
I have spent a long time thinking about what separates the leaders who build things that outlast them from the ones who leave wreckage where organisations used to be. There are thousands of frameworks, countless MBA modules, and an entire industry devoted to answering that question, and most of them are wrong, or at least […]
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The Difference Between Leadership and Management: Why Leaders Create Discomfort and Managers Mask it
1. Management and Leadership Are Not the Same Thing There is a fundamental confusion in how organizations talk about leadership, because we use the word interchangeably with management and we should not. Management is the art of moving things from point A to point B; it is process, it is orderly, and you can measure […]
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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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