The satisfying story of institutional failure has a villain — someone who knew, who chose, who can be named and removed. The accurate story rarely does. Institutions mostly fail the way the firm in Margin…
Decentralised Command: The Canonical Pair
Extreme Ownership and Turn the Ship Around! are the two most cited books on distributed authority in organisational settings, and they are superficially contradictory. One argues that a leader must own everything — total responsibility,…
“I Intend To”: Three Words That Move Authority
The mechanism sounds minor: change “request permission to do X” to “I intend to do X.” The person receiving the communication can still stop it — nothing prevents a senior officer from saying no. The…
Be First, or Be Left Holding It
The senior executive in Margin Call — a fictional film about a fictional firm — states the logic plainly: in a collapsing market, there are three ways to survive. Be first, be smarter, or cheat. He is…
Where Power Actually Sits
There is the authority an organisation chart describes, and there is the authority that actually operates. They overlap, but never completely, and the space between them is where a surprising amount of institutional life happens…
The Comprehension Gap
There is a failure mode that appears in organisations of every kind and at every scale. It is not caused by bad people, or greed, or negligence, though those things may compound it. It is…
Extreme Ownership: There Are No Bad Teams
The principle is deliberately stated without qualification: a leader owns everything in their world. Not the successes and some of the failures. Everything. If the team fails to perform, the leader failed to prepare, organise,…
The Cluster F**k Intensity Scale
Every established discipline has a severity scale. Seismology has the Mercalli Intensity Scale. Meteorology has the Beaufort Scale. Nuclear safety has the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale. Each one works the same way: a…
Productive Conflict vs Artificial Harmony
When a meeting is very smooth — decisions reached quickly, no significant dissent, everyone aligned — it is tempting to read this as a sign of a well-functioning team. Lencioni’s model suggests almost the opposite:…
The Team That Works
Most explanations of why a team isn’t working point at the visible problems. People aren’t aligned. They’re not motivated. They’re not delivering. The instinct is to address the thing you can see — to push…