Executive Opinions

Corporate leaders everywhere crave momentum. They seek progress, faster outcomes, and robust growth. Yet siloed teams struggle to integrate innovative technology in ways that produce long-term value. Gen AI, the next big wave of transformative technology, cannot be deployed successfully by a single team operating in isolation. That is why I advocate for cross-functional Gen AI...

Leadership theory sounds abstract until it explains the world as we experience it. Robert Kegan’s work on adult development offers a language for why some leaders thrive in complexity while others retreat to control, consensus, or chaos. It also explains why wisdom, courage and imagination remain rare at the very moment they...

The core function of leadership can be found in three words: Make a decision.   Regardless of industry, position, team size, or title, the de facto leader of any group is the person who chooses the next step. Yet the simple act of making a choice stymies many leaders, with one study...

As organisations move into 2026, leadership is being tested in ways that few anticipated even a decade ago. Not because of a single disruptive force, but because of the compounding speed at which change is now unfolding across every industry. Futurist and author Ray Kurzweil has long argued that humanity is on...

A Simple Way to Make Leadership Development More Effective For the past 25 years, leadership development has increasingly focused on soft skills. Over the same period, project and change initiative failure rates have barely moved. That may explain why 75% of organisations say their leadership development is not effective. Continuing to double down...

To this day, Julius Caesar - with a career that is both a blueprint for success and a stark warning of how success can come to an abrupt and tragic end - remains one of history's most compelling case studies in leadership. With this in mind, this extract from “Lead Like Julius Caesar: Timeless...

Since 2015, Costco has consistently outperformed Walmart across every key indicator, including stock price, net profit, and customer KPIs. Why? The answer lies not in scale or cost efficiency, but in collaboration. Costco has built stronger connections across its supply chain, ensuring every team member understands their role and communicates effectively...

Research shows we judge our own vulnerability through a more negative lens than others do. In what’s known as the ‘beautiful mess effect’, the moments we may perceive as weakness, others might view as courageous. I learnt this the day I got escorted off Facebook's headquarters in Silicon Valley. I had flown from Melbourne with one mission: find Mark Zuckerberg and make him laugh...

A troubling phenomenon is spreading through corporate America, creating friction where artificial intelligence promised efficiency. Researchers at BetterUp and Stanford's Social Media Lab coined the term "workslop" to describe AI-generated content that appears polished but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance any task. This represents more than a minor irritation. The research estimates that workers waste nearly two hours...

At some point in our careers, all of us have sat through a deadly boring presentation. Slide after slide of size 10 font, multiple indistinguishable charts and a sleep-inducing delivery. Thirty minutes of your life you’ll never get back. It might sound extreme, but in reality it’s not as rare as it should be. And without the...