Management has a long habit of inventing instruments to turn intention into action, and an equally long habit of watching each one harden into paperwork. When it happens, we blame the organisation…
No organisation matches the brochure. The question is what you do about the gap — and whether you have any right to. International development runs on a settled principle: reform must be owned by the…
Every incentive system that fails is easy to criticise. The difficult ones are those that work.In the late 1990s David Harvie sold for a firm that ran its Sydney floor as a concentric ring: new…
The Commonwealth supplies less than half the revenue of Australia's universities and sets very nearly all of their terms. We have spent a decade arguing about fees, caps, international student numbers…
Nine years of rising conversation about artificial intelligence, and a measured return that has not moved. The comfortable reading is that the technology was oversold. The uncomfortable one is that we…
The second essay in the Prior Obligations series, released as articles in audio format, follows a number from birth to dashboard. When a felt condition becomes a score out of one hundred, it acquires…
This week I begin a five-part series, Prior Obligations, released as articles in audio format. It starts with a farmer in a harvester cabin and an executive who never learned to type, because the…
An employee who is not spending enough money is not doing their job properly. That is not satire. It is the logic of a productivity metric currently in use in organisations measuring their people by…
A post came across my feed this week that I have not been able to put down. A client wanted a Chief AI Officer and told its search partner not to look for a technologist, because the technologists…
We call the move from doing the work to managing the people who do it a promotion — as though there were only one direction worth travelling. Jarrod Myers took that step, ran it for a year, read the…
