Performance Theatre in Professional Services
In 2024, the Audit Reform Lab at the University of Sheffield published a finding 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 […]