Writing

Essays about leadership, identity and the lives inside our decisions


I write about the human consequences beneath the visible story: what leadership asks of people, what work comes to mean about our worth, and who gets to author the meaning of what happens next.

Some of this writing begins in boardrooms. Some begins in shame, loss or identity. It belongs together because the same question runs through it: what happens when the story we are given is not the whole truth?

Featured

As Leaders, Are We Asking HR to Carry Too Much?

I spent one morning beside a Head of HR through eleven meetings, one after another, each ending someone's role. I still believe she was right to lead them. What I didn't understand yet was the difference between who speaks and who stays responsible.

A follow-up to the essay that reached over 127,000 people, taking the same morning further.

Selected Writing

Leadership and the people part

Spotting the Hidden Problems During a Strong Quarter

Strong results can conceal what people have stopped saying, what leaders have stopped noticing and what the organisation may be quietly borrowing from its future.

iGBA

One of Those Names

On a message from a stranger who'd been removed from an org chart after twenty-four years, and what kept coming back in the replies to her own follow-up post: losing the job was never the deepest wound. Losing the identity was.

LinkedIn

Identity, agency and what remains

The Years Still Count

What survives when the thing we believed proved our worth disappears, and why the years behind us still count.

The Agency Letters

The Letter I Owe Her

Some stories remain hidden not because they do not matter, but because shame has been telling us what they are allowed to mean.

The Lady's Realm Journal Originally published under the pen name Annie

Staying human in the age of AI

AI Is Making Affiliate Businesses Leaner. But at What Cost?

What becomes disposable when efficiency is allowed to become the only story a business tells about value.

iGBA

On Substack

The Agency Letters

The Agency Letters is an ongoing collection of essays about the stories we make from what happens to us, especially when loss, shame or change begins speaking as though it knows the whole truth about who we are.

This is not writing from the far side of a tidy transformation. It is writing from the middle, where the meaning is still being made.

The letters return to four enduring questions:

  • Who gets to author the meaning of what happens to us?
  • What survives when the thing we believed proved our worth disappears, and is beginning again ever really starting from zero?
  • Is it loss, or have we merely lost sight of it?
  • What do we owe the people who think they already know our story?

Shorter Observations and Open Conversations

I also write on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is often where an observation first meets other people's experience. I write there about leadership, working life, identity and the questions that are still unfolding, and the comments frequently become part of what I understand next.

Community and Journal

The Lady's Realm

I am one of the founding voices behind The Lady's Realm, a community and journal for women living through transition. I wrote one of its first letters under the pen name Annie, before I was ready to put my own name beside the story. The name gave me some distance. The story was always mine.