When the Average Does the Talking
Why a third of Britain no longer believes in the degree I spent three years at law school, a year at my post-grad and emerged with a qualification which, in the early 2000s, functioned exactly as advertised. It opened a door, and behind that door was a career. I mention this because I am aware […]
Lower Value Human Capital
Why the scandal was the vocabulary, not the layoffs I have spent most of my career around investment committees and boardroom tables where people describe other people in transactional language. Capital allocation, headcount optimisation, resource rationalisation. The jargon is familiar enough that most executives stop hearing it. Which is why, when Standard Chartered’s chief executive […]
The Priorities Nobody Voted For
In May 2024, a High Court judge ruled that the British government’s plan for meeting its own climate targets was unlawful. The plan relied on assumptions the court found incomplete and overly optimistic. Ministers were ordered to go back and produce a credible one within twelve months. When the ruling landed, roughly seven million people […]
The Architecture of Accountability
In September 2024, the Grenfell Tower Inquiry published its final report. It concluded that the building safety regime in England and Wales had been ‘seriously defective’ for decades. Seventy-two people died in a tower block whose cladding had been certified, inspected, and approved within a system that every responsible body believed was someone else’s job […]
The Myth of the Level Playing Field
In September 2024, the UK Social Mobility Commission published a new index mapping the prospects of young people aged 25 to 44 across 203 local authority areas. The findings were plain. A young person in the London commuter belt faced a fundamentally different set of chances from a young person in Hartlepool or Blackpool, and […]
Performance Theatre in Professional Services
The Audit Reform Lab at the University of Sheffield published a finding in 2024 that should have stopped the profession cold. Auditors had failed to warn of possible bankruptcy in roughly 75 per cent of the largest 250 listed UK companies that collapsed between 2010 and 2022. Every one of those companies had received a […]
What Leverage Actually Means
The word ‘leverage’ appears in career advice so often that it has stopped meaning anything specific. Most articles gesture at career leverage meaning, but describe ambition, visibility, or intensity rather than the property the word actually names. That property is precise and testable. It determines whether a unit of work keeps generating returns after the […]
The Credential Economy’s Final Settlement
At Durham University, in the UK, 18.4 per cent of graduates received a first-class degree in 2011. By 2024, that figure had reached 39.6 per cent. At Imperial College London, it went from 30.9 per cent to 52.5 per cent over the same period. The Office for Students, England’s higher education regulator, found that at […]
The Return of Consequence
Every significant accountability failure in institutions follows a similar sequence. Warnings surface. Internal reports are filed. Staff raise concerns through the designated channels. The system receives each signal, acknowledges it, and continues without changing direction. Then something external (a regulator, a market, a court, an incident) imposes the cost the institution declined to impose on […]