Category: Corporate Culture
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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Federation vs Centralisation: Stop Burying Tech Talent
There’s a question that quietly shapes the fate of technology talent in almost every organisation, and most businesses never ask it directly. Instead, they stumble into an answer through a series of incremental org design decisions, budget cycles, and leadership preferences. The question is this: is technology a support function to the business, or is […]
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Management vs Leadership: Why Promoting Managers Fails
Management and leadership sound so similar that they are often used interchangeably. True, they are both a sport. But details matter when you want to win. Nowhere is this more visible than in financial services. Banks today do not compete inside a known, stable competitive set. The threat landscape runs from a two-person fintech with […]
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Why Bolting AI onto Existing Org Structures Always Fails
There is an old urban legend, immortalised as one of the original Darwin Award nominations, about a man who bolted a JATO unit to a 1967 Chevrolet Impala. JATO stands for Jet Assisted Take Off. It is a solid fuel rocket designed to give heavy military transport aircraft the extra thrust they need to leave […]
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How Product Team Structures Inflate Engineer Performance Ratings
There is a product team performance bias hiding in plain sight inside every organisation that has moved to product aligned engineering, except that it does not show up as a number on a dashboard, a flag in a talent calibration session, or a red line in an engagement survey. It accumulates quietly, year on year, […]
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