Leadership Acumen

Leadership Acumen was the publication that gave this practice its second life. It began in 2002 as a short bulletin sent to the directors and executives who had passed through a programme in Banff, and it kept going for the better part of two decades, eventually running to more than thirty-five numbered issues split across two shelves: governance articles for people sitting on boards, and leadership articles for people running organizations.

It was never a marketing letter. Issues ran to six, ten, sometimes fourteen pages of argument, with models drawn out in full, competing schools of thought set against each other fairly, and a closing section of further reading. That is unusual for a consultancy newsletter, and it is the reason this archive exists: the writing outlived the business that produced it, and a good deal of it is still being cited.

What was in it

The governance shelf worked through the machinery of boards. What is the real work of governance, as distinct from management. How the recognized models of board governance differ and where each one runs out of road. What transparency actually obliges a board to disclose, and to whom. What stewardship means once you take it beyond the word. Whether trust is better restored by writing more rules or by agreeing stronger principles. What questions a director ought to be asking, and what the chair's job actually is.

The leadership shelf worked through the practice of running things. Decision quality at senior level. Leading in networks and alliances where nobody reports to you. Knowledge leadership and intellectual capital. Collaboration and interdependence. Why organizations should develop leadership at all, and what happens to the pipeline when they stop. And, in one of the most widely read issues, the deceptively small question of what a job title is really for.

The issues preserved here

Six of the most cited issues have been restored as full pages in this archive, rewritten from the recovered originals:

• Issue 21 - Models of Corporate and Board Governance. The five recognized models, why they are not rivals, and how boards actually blend them. The most linked-to article the practice ever published.
• Issue 27 - What's in a Job Title?. Titles as accountability signals, the drift of the C-suite, and what stratified-systems thinking says about how many layers an organization can justify.
• Issue 17 - Stewardship. The most abused word in governance, taken apart and put back together across the public, corporate and association domains.
• Issue 8 - Transparency: Exactly What Do You Mean?. Why transparency and accountability are two sides of one coin, and why disclosure alone is not transparency.
• Issue 19 - Five Dynamics of Network Leadership. Leading where authority is not hierarchical, built on the practice's four frames of leadership perspective.
• Issue 16 - Governance Principles versus Rules. The post-scandal regulatory argument, and why it is really an argument about restoring trust.
• Feature - The Seven C's of Knowledge Leadership. How leadership changes when the capital being managed is human rather than financial.

Issues not restored

Many more issues existed than are reproduced here. Among them: the intangibles of governance; why leadership is so important to develop; improving board and executive decision-making; integrity; the questions governors should be asking; collaboration and interdependence; the board chair; boards, bankruptcies and blunders; vision; outcomes; teams; change, chaos and globalization; creative abrasion; executive thinking; the leadership gap; using paradox to drive innovation; and productivity.

Where an issue is not reproduced, the reason is simple and worth stating: its text could not be recovered cleanly, and no honest page can be written from a title alone. Requests for those old article addresses arrive here, at the archive index, rather than at a page invented to receive them.

Why the writing has lasted

Governance writing dates badly when it is pegged to whichever scandal was in the newspapers that month. A good deal of Leadership Acumen was written in the years immediately after the corporate collapses of the early 2000s, and the temptation to write reactively must have been considerable. Mostly it resisted. The issues that have lasted are the ones that went after structure instead: what a board is for, how a decision gets made badly, what a word like stewardship commits you to once you use it in a mission statement.

The other reason is tone. These were articles written for people who already held the job, and they assume it. They do not explain what a board is. They do not soften the point that most directors were trained for some other kind of work entirely and have to learn governance from a standing start. Readers who have sat in those chairs tend to find that refreshing.

For contemporary treatments of the same ground, the G20/OECD Principles of Corporate Governance and the UK Corporate Governance Code remain the two documents most of this writing was arguing with, either explicitly or in the background.

This is an archive. Nothing here is on offer, nothing is for sale, and there is no mailing list to join. The board governance and executive leadership sections record the practice the writing came out of.