On the Subject of Leadership

Most conversations about corporate governance begin with structure—committees, charters, the machinery of oversight. This one ends on the side of a dirt road in Nepal in 1999, and the road turns out to explain the boardroom rather better than the boardroom explains itself. In this episode of On the Subject of Leadership , I speak with Rachel Condos-Fields —Independent Non-Executive Director of Sta...

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 Product Manager , the lecturer who built the first product management course in the engineering sch...

Most organisations now claim to be adopting artificial intelligence. Far fewer can describe what they are actually adopting it into . In this episode of On the Subject of Leadership , I speak with Clare Kitching, founder of Cambiq Consulting—formerly of McKinsey, QuantumBlack, and Treasury Wine Estates—about what responsible AI leadership actually requires in this country, at this moment. Clare's...

A bonus release from the Inner Circle feed, made available to all listeners. Weekly article readings are normally reserved for Inner Circle members; this is the opening piece of a four-part series, opened more widely as a way in. The remaining three articles are available to read at robert.winter.ink or to hear on the Inner Circle's private podcast feed. Join the Inner Circle at robert.winter.ink...

Most technology transformations do not stall because the technology fails. They stall because no one in the room has resolved a prior question—what, precisely, is being changed, and who is accountable for that change surviving contact with the business. Pascal Uerlings has spent six years working at that unresolved question, building one of Australia's more prominent Salesforce and AI implementati...

A bonus release from the Inner Circle feed, made available to all listeners. Weekly article readings are normally reserved for Inner Circle members; this is one of the occasional pieces opened more widely. Join the Inner Circle at robert.winter.ink The most dangerous failure in corporate governance is rarely the rogue executive or the captured auditor. It is the quieter pattern of a board of intel...

Nick Hassett has spent more than three decades intervening in organisations under pressure—not as a theorist, but as someone called in when the politics are already difficult and the gap between what the board believes is happening and what is actually happening has grown wider than anyone has yet said aloud. His work spans banking, technology, essential infrastructure, and sport across Australia...

Craig Baker has spent the past eighteen months in growth and sales leadership at Jarvis, shaping strategy and securing commitment at the front end of enterprise technology engagements—predominantly in utilities and infrastructure. When a customer gap demanded more than arm's-length management, he chose to step back into delivery. What he found was not the reassurance that a well-sold solution was...

Agile promised empowered teams and faster learning. In many organisations, it has delivered something closer to ritual—stand-ups, sprints, and dashboards—often without the autonomy those practices were meant to enable. Martin Kearns has observed this shift from the inside. An early Scrum practitioner and now an enterprise agility advisor, he has spent two decades helping organisations rethink how...

Abdullah Ramay is the Chief Executive Officer of Pablo & Rusty’s Coffee Roasters—a name many listeners will recognise from the label on their morning brew. In this episode of On the Subject of Leadership , we explore what it actually means to run a purpose-led business when purpose stops being a slogan and starts imposing constraints. In Abdullah’s world, flavour, margin, agriculture, and envi...

Chris McGowan is the founder and CEO of ThunderLabs , an Australian firm working across digital experiences, customer identity, and specialist recruitment. Before building ThunderLabs, Chris spent years inside the recruitment industry—giving him a front-row view of how organisations actually coordinate work, reward competence, and quietly fail when hierarchy substitutes for judgment. In this conve...