John is a boat engineer. He designs the structures that keep vessels seaworthy — load, resistance, water pressure, the kind of work where “close enough” doesn’t hold up. We spent several weeks talking about his business before we talked about money at all: harbours, jurisdictions, a satellite connection that only ran in maritime...
The Cost of Being Told What You Want to Hear Sycophancy is a systemic risk in leadership environments, not a personality flaw in any individual advisor. It compounds quietly, and most leaders cannot detect it from inside their own organisation. Sycophancy is usually discussed as a character flaw — a weakness in the...
The Compliance Function Knows. It Just Can’t Say. The people inside organisations whose job is to see risk first are often structurally silenced from saying so clearly. That silence is rational, not negligent — and it is exactly why it is dangerous. Almost every serious regulatory or financial failure I have examined, after...
Succession Is a Test You Can’t Study For Leadership transitions reveal the true health of an organisation’s power structure more than any other event — and most founders avoid planning for it until it is too late to do well. Every organisation believes its power structure is sound until the moment that structure...
The Decision Was Made Months Before the Meeting Most consequential decisions are not made in the meeting where they are announced. By then, the room has already decided — informally, unaccountably, and earlier than anyone admits. There is a particular kind of meeting that every experienced operator recognises, even if they rarely name...
Why Advice Fails at the Top Senior leaders are often the worst-advised people in any organisation. Not for lack of advisors — because everyone around them has something to lose from candour. There is a peculiar irony at the top of most organisations. The further someone rises, the more advisors accumulate around them...
What the Ledger Doesn’t Show Exposure rarely accumulates in the documents that were written. It accumulates in the ones that weren’t. On absence as evidence. Every forensic accountant learns the same early lesson, usually by getting it wrong once: the ledger tells you what happened to the money the organisation chose to record....
The Org Chart Is a Cover Story The chart shows who has authority. It rarely shows who has influence. Most strategic mistakes are made by people reading the wrong one. Every organisation produces two structures simultaneously. The first is the one on the chart: boxes, lines, titles, a clean hierarchy that can be...
The Honest Room On the gap between what is known and what is said — and why most catastrophic decisions happen in rooms full of informed people. In forensic investigation, the first document you learn to distrust is the minutes of the meeting where everything went wrong. Not because the minutes are falsified...
