Journal
Notes from the desk.
Occasional writing on cross-border governance, female leadership in boardrooms, and the quieter parts of running regulated financial services groups.
- Governance · Compliance · Culture · 3 min
What an incident review shows that an annual report cannot
The texture of a firm's real operating culture lives in how it responds when something breaks.
Read - Governance · Boardroom · Strategy · 4 min
Succession Planning for Boards That Have Never Changed
A board without turnover has not yet answered its most important governance question.
Read - Governance · Compliance · Boardroom · 4 min
What the Senior Managers Regime asks of the people it does not name
The certification requirement creates a category of accountability that sits between individual culpability and organisational negligence.
Read - Governance · Boardroom · Compliance · 3 min
Why I read the appendices first
The real information lives in footnotes, schedules, and the spaces between line items.
Read - Family office · Governance · Culture · 4 min
Discretion as operational discipline, not just restraint
Family offices taught me that discretion is not about knowing what to hide. It is about knowing what to say.
Read - Governance · Boardroom · Compliance · 3 min
Board reporting is not management reporting dressed up
One is a record of what happened. The other is a frame for what matters. Confusing them creates blindness at the top.
Read - Culture · Strategy · Career · 3 min
Why I keep an art world conversation open inside finance
The discipline of art business sharpens how I read a balance sheet and a board paper alike.
Read - Governance · Compliance · Family office · 4 min
Private capital, public scrutiny, and the standards that travel between them
The governance frameworks of regulated firms have lessons for family offices and private capital structures that choose not to adopt them.
Read - Governance · Boardroom · Strategy · 4 min
The work that shapes nothing visible
Most governance impact happens in conversations that leave no trace, between people who will never discuss it again.
Read - Investor relations · Strategy · Governance · 3 min
Why I track relationships, not just deals, in an investor CRM
A CRM is a governance tool first. Its purpose is memory, not pipeline acceleration.
Read - Strategy · Boardroom · Governance · 3 min
The value of a slow first quarter inside a new firm
Speed signals competence. Slowness signals that you are reading the room before you move.
Read - Governance · Compliance · Boardroom · 4 min
What I have learned from MLROs who are confident enough to disagree
The best compliance officers do not exist to rubber-stamp. They exist to think.
Read - Governance · Boardroom · Family office · 4 min
Founder to Chair. The Governance Turn.
When a founder steps into the chair role, the board's entire relationship to decision-making must shift.
Read - Female leadership · Career · 4 min
The case for sitting on a smaller board before a larger one
A regulated subsidiary, a private company, an operating charity. The apprenticeship most professional women have not yet been told to seek.
Read - Governance · Cross-border · 5 min
Three jurisdictions, one operating model
What stays constant when you build a private holding group across the UK, the Bahamas, and the UAE.
Read - Audit · Governance · 4 min
On the quiet competence of internal audit
The function that gets the least attention relative to the value it produces, and what good internal audit actually looks like.
Read - Boardroom · Family office · 4 min
Notes on chairing a private board where shareholders and management overlap
Founder-led groups, family-owned holdings, institutionalising partnerships. The separation has to be invented rather than inherited.
Read - Strategy · Governance · 4 min
Why a strong COO is more useful, most of the time, than a charismatic CEO
An unfashionable answer to a question I get at conferences, and the regulated-business case behind it.
Read - Investor relations · Career · 4 min
What I learned about investor relations from listening to private banking clients
Four habits picked up on the desk that I have carried into institutional IR ever since.
Read - Audit · Boardroom · 4 min
On running an audit committee when the auditor is new to the firm
The first year of a new external auditor is harder than most chairs admit. Three things to manage at once.
Read - Female leadership · Boardroom · 4 min
What the FTSE Women Leaders Review still does not say
The 40 percent target has moved the headline number. The pipeline beneath it is the harder problem.
Read - Governance · Compliance · 4 min
Why a regulated firm's incident review is more revealing than its annual report
The honesty differential between the two documents is enormous. Read the incident summary first.
Read - Governance · Strategy · 3 min
On the difference between governance and bureaucracy
Good governance is quieter than bureaucracy. Knowing which one you have built is a useful question to ask.
Read - Boardroom · Governance · 3 min
On succession planning for boards that have not yet had a single change of seat
Long-tenured boards do not know how good they are at changing a member. The risk is bigger than it sounds.
Read - Career · Strategy · 3 min
Why I keep asking new senior hires about their last bad week
An interview question I have been using for seven years, and what the four answers reveal.
Read - Culture · Career · 4 min
Why an Art Business certificate sits next to my CISI diploma
On studying with Christie's Education, and what art markets quietly teach a finance career.
Read - Compliance · Governance · 4 min
On reading rulebooks for what they do not say
The silences in regulatory text are where the supervisor's real expectations live.
Read - Family office · Governance · 3 min
What family offices teach a finance career about discretion
Three years inside a multi-family office, and a working definition of discretion I had not met anywhere else.
Read - Governance · Strategy · 3 min
On the difference between board reporting and management reporting
Two products built from the same data, sometimes confused, and what each is for.
Read - Governance · Boardroom · 3 min
Why I read the appendices first
An inversion in board-paper reading, and what the back of the pack usually contains.
Read - Boardroom · Governance · 3 min
Notes on writing for the board pack
What makes a director read the second page, and how to earn the first.
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