Dr Winter writes on leadership, governance, and the conditions that determine whether either is practised well.
Most conversations about artificial intelligence and the executive begin with a number that refuses to move. For the better part of a decade the surveys have promised imminent transformation; for the same decade the measured return has stayed obstinately flat, and the proportion of firms capturing any material earnings impact
A score creates an owner, a dashboard, a target, and a budget—everything except an improvement in the condition it measures. The second essay in the Prior Obligations series examines what happens when 'psychological debt' becomes a number, and which way its arrows actually run.
Six new names for old wounds. The 'psychological debt' said to accompany AI is neither novel nor peculiar to the technology—it is the perennial business of managing people through change. The first of five essays on what the diagnosis gets right, and what it conveniently overlooks.
There is a familiar shape to the discussion of artificial intelligence in Australian enterprises. Adoption figures rise. Pilot counts rise. Licence spend rises. Somewhere in the annual report a paragraph appears attesting to the organisation's commitment to the technology, and somewhere in a board pack a slide attests
An executive search brief gets the diagnosis right: the constraint on value is not technical. Then it advertises a vacancy. The authority to prioritise, to fund, and to stop already sits with someone. Creating a post rather than confronting an incumbent is a governance evasion.
The leadership literature, and the organisations that consume it, share an unexamined assumption about direction. Progress means ascent. One begins as an individual contributor, demonstrates competence, and is rewarded with the management of others; from there the ladder continues upward through seniority into the executive, and the person who has
Australia already has the machinery for real accountability—Hayne's findings, the Financial Accountability Regime's own published design, et al. What it lacks is the will to switch it on, because the people who can are the very people it would bind. On the law we possess but struggle to use.
Every serious corporate failure of the past two decades has been examined, in retrospect, by people who found the frameworks in good order. The risk register existed. The policy was current. The audit had been passed, the certificate hung in reception, and the board had received its quarterly pack on
Most conversations about corporate governance begin with structure—committees, charters, the machinery of oversight. This one begins on the side of a dirt road in Nepal in 1999, and I make no apology for that, because the road turns out to explain the boardroom rather better than the boardroom
The demand to measure the return on our ethics is not a problem to be solved but a symptom to be read. On why pricing virtue corrupts it—and why a firm that can measure the return on its integrity has already begun to spend it.
Generative AI has made plausible ideas nearly free, and a fashionable argument says this changes everything. It doesn't. Ideas were never scarce—judgement was, and remains so. On Grub Street at industrial scale, AI slop, and the only mile that was ever hard.
The fraud doesn't end at appointment—it must be maintained. The people best placed to name it are the people whose interests depend on not naming it. Part two of two on who keeps the corporate con moving, and the one question that stops it.
Boards keep hiring the executive who says yes. An entire market—search, remuneration, coaching, consulting—now manufactures the corporate saviour and has no mechanism for telling the truth about what he can deliver. Part one of two on the fraud that begins at appointment.
Most conversations about artificial intelligence and the product manager begin by asking whether the role survives. This one begins somewhere more useful: by asking what the role was ever actually for. In this episode of On the Subject of Leadership , I speak with Ken Sandy —author of The Influential
Part IV of a IV part series. The organisations capturing real value from AI are not better at AI; they are better at running organisations. The specific moves boards and executives can make to join them—and why nine years of evidence says most will not.