Resources
Insights
Grounded, practical perspectives, shaped by the challenges we've helped clients solve.
The Separation Scorecard
Boards treat legal separation as the finish line, but the evidence says the real risk is the assets nobody scored before the clock started, from a UK bank's five-year IT dependency to an Australian retailer still untangling systems nine years on. Drawing on six real separations, this article shows why and introduces the Separation Scorecard, a way to find out before the timeline is set.
The Governance Gap
Transformation programs are increasingly handing real decisions to AI and automated systems, treated as a technology choice like any other. Five independent studies show accountability hasn't kept pace: most organisations running AI in production have no clearly named person responsible when the system gets it wrong, a gap Australia has already tested at national scale with catastrophic results. This article examines that gap through two cases, a $2.35 billion government failure and a US property algorithm that lost hundreds of millions, and sets out the Named Owner Protocol for closing it before go-live.
The Generalist Premium
Boards pay a documented 19% premium for executives with broad, cross-industry experience over specialists, on the assumption that breadth makes for better leadership. This article tests that assumption against the evidence, and against a decade of one Australian company's leadership record, to find out where it holds and where it doesn't.
The Debt Nobody Reports
Every transformation program inherits technical debt from the business it's changing, and most executives treat it as a sunk IT cost rather than an active risk. CIOs can already say what share of the technology estate is debt and what it costs to service, yet that figure rarely reaches the people who decide what gets funded, because it's spoken in the wrong language for a risk committee. Using a US airline's billion-dollar operational collapse and an Australian government system failure as evidence, this article shows how to translate technical debt into a risk an executive team will actually act on.
Always Mid-Change
Most companies still plan transformation as a program with a start date and an end date, budgeted, staffed and closed out like a construction project. The organisations that handle change best don't appear to believe the end date is real: one Australian company has run three consecutive, multi-year strategies back-to-back since 2018 with no reset in between. This article draws on the research behind organisational change capacity to explain why the gap between programs matters as much as the programs themselves and offers a short way to measure it.
The Leadership Blindspot
Executive teams have leaned on a validated four-trait model to score leadership potential since Harvard Business Review published it in 2017 and treated it as a lasting verdict. Nobody, not even the researchers behind it, ever added a second measurement: 93% of leadership-potential studies never re-test the same person to check whether an early score predicted anything, and only 20% of CHROs can point to a ready successor when a critical role opens. This article names that gap inside the model that popularised the idea, and using a UK insurer that filled all but one of nineteen senior openings internally as evidence, sets out the Leadership Growth Ledger for scoring potential twice and trusting the second result over the first.