RESEARCH · PROVOCATION · FIELD NOTES
The questions worth sitting with.
Some of this is finished thinking. Some is thinking in progress.
When did you last ask your Asian leaders what the system is costing them?
THE ADAPTIVE TAX
You localize everything else. Why not the system that grows your leaders?
THE ADAPTIVE TAX
The most accurate intelligence in the organization often belongs to the people who have stopped being asked for it.
FIELD NOTES
FORTHCOMING · 2026
LEADERSHIP · ASIA
The Adaptive Tax
The Hidden Cost of Leading Across Cultures in Asia
Global organizations localize everything — product, compliance, marketing. The system that evaluates, develops, and promotes leaders? Still plug and play. And the leaders absorbing the cost of that mismatch are often the ones the organization can least afford to lose.
Framed not as a fairness issue but as a pipeline problem, a performance drag, and a deceleration mechanism for organizations that cannot afford one.
ESSAY · FORTHCOMING
IMAGE · PRACTICE
Joy That Survived Its Container
On Giacomelli, priests in the snow, and what organizations ask people to leave at the door
Mario Giacomelli photographed seminarians at play in the snow. Men in the most constrained uniform imaginable, inside the most rule-bound institution imaginable — running, spinning, laughing. The photograph exists because he saw it and knew it mattered.
That's not whimsy. That's joy that survived its container. And it turns out that's exactly what the best leaders do.
New research, field notes, and the occasional provocation — when they're ready, not on a schedule.