Category: Corporate Culture
Toxic Ownership Models: How Corporate Culture Fails Clients
1. Ownership Has Been Turned Into a Moral Shortcut Ownership has become one of the most lazily celebrated concepts in modern organisations. Leaders demand it reflexively, teams chase it performatively, and entire operating models are justified by invoking it as if ownership itself produces outcomes. It does not. Ownership is merely a structural choice, and […]
Read more →Why Boredom Drives Innovation More Than Busy Work
1. Fear, Motion, and the Illusion of Progress In the last few months I’ve come up with two of the most powerful fraud controls of my career. Not in a workshop. Not in a brainstorm with sticky notes and a facilitator. I walked to the car park, lay down in my car, closed my eyes, […]
Read more →Technology Leadership Competence: Self-Assessment Guide
A Self Assessment for Technology Leaders This questionnaire explores how you think about technology leadership, systems, teams, and delivery. There are no right or wrong answers. Each question presents four options that reflect different leadership styles and priorities. Simply select the option that best reflects your natural instinct in each situation. Select one answer per […]
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AI First Mover Finality: Why Reaction Becomes Impossible
1. The Physics Makes the Point Brutal Here is the uncomfortable physics problem. If two Death Stars come into existence at the same time, and one fires first, the other never gets to respond. Not because it is slower.Not because its sensors are worse.But because causality itself prevents reaction. A weapon travelling at the speed […]
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Are You the World’s Worst Tech Leader? Self-Assessment
This is a self assessment. It is not balanced. It is not gentle. It is not here to validate your operating model, your org chart, or the deck you use to reassure executives. It exists to surface how you actually think about technology leadership when pressure arrives and incentives collide with reality. Answer honestly. Not […]
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Leadership Fragility: Ownership vs Blame in 5 Steps
Leadership failures rarely announce themselves politely. They arrive disguised as “can we just check in?” or “let’s align on a better way of working.” It sounds constructive, even mature. But scratch the surface and the origin story is almost always the same: something went wrong, and the organisation does not know how to deal with […]
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Corporate Culture: Stop Running From Lions, Start Leading
1. Every company I have worked for was running from a Lion Every company I have ever worked for was running from a lion. Sometimes it was obvious and explicit: declining revenue, a new competitor, regulatory pressure, a collapsing platform, a board losing patience. Sometimes it was quieter and more personal: a role under threat, […]
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Why Asking ‘Why?’ Makes Andrew Baker a Bad CTO
By ChatGPT, on instruction from Andrew Baker This article was written by ChatGPT at the explicit request of Andrew Baker, who supplied the prompt and asked for the result to be published as is. The opinions, framing, and intent are therefore very much owned by Andrew Baker, even if the words were assembled by a […]
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Why TOGAF Fails Modern Enterprise Architecture
You can survive on it for a while. You definitely should not build a mission around it. 1. The analogy nobody asked for, but everyone deserves Potatoes are incredible. They are calorie dense, resilient, cheap, and historically important. They are also completely useless for space travel. No propulsion, no navigation, no life support, no guidance […]
Read more →7 Corporate Culture Sins Destroying Your Organisation
An ancient taxonomy for very modern dysfunction The original seven deadly sins endure because they describe human failure modes, not theology. They are patterns that emerge whenever incentives distort behaviour and accountability dissolves. That makes them an uncomfortably precise model for corporate culture. Below, each sin is paired with its mirrored virtue. Not as moral […]
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