The public notebook.
Essays on voice, judgement and the craft of being understood — the arguments behind the practice, written to be argued with. New pieces surface in The Witting Note first, then land here.
The meeting where you were first ignored
Rooms decide how to hear you long before you finish your first slide. This essay unpacks what that early decision is actually about — preparation signals, the shape of your opening sentence, the distance between your posture and your purpose — and the two structural moves that reliably change it. With the tale of a chief executive whose board had stopped listening eighteen months before she noticed.
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Why your best people write worst
Promotion rewards certainty; good writing requires its absence. The professionals most afraid of being wrong produce prose most afraid of being read — hedges stacked on hedges, position buried under balance. How firms break the loop: argument before adornment, the right to be wrong in draft, and the marginal art of the one-sentence summary.
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Rehearse the pauses, not the words
Twelve keynotes staged in one season taught a single lesson: a script is finished when its silences are. Notes from the staging room on choreographing a talk — where the pause falls, when to leave the lectern, what the back row sees at second ten — and why the word-by-word read-through is the last, not the first, rehearsal.
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The economics of clarity
Clear writing is not decoration; it is arbitrage. Every paragraph that survives being skimmed is work your reader did not have to do — and attention, in professional services, is the only currency that compounds. A short economic history of the sentence, from the memoranda of great institutions to the emails in your drafts folder.
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Narrate the option you rejected
Judgement made visible reads as leadership; judgement kept invisible reads as luck. The smallest, most learnable move is narrating the road not taken: 'we considered the consolidated structure and rejected it because—'. On turning reasoning into a habit that others can follow, audit, and — the point — trust.
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In defence of the unfashionable summary
Somewhere between the memo and the meeting, the executive summary forgot its job: to carry the whole argument in one defensible page. A short defence of the most skipped, most valuable section of any document — with a checklist for rebuilding yours before your next board paper does the skipping for you.
Read the essay →Take the arguments. Keep the provenance.
These essays may be quoted with attribution and argued withanywhere — that is what they are for. Internal circulation within your firm is fine too; several piecesnow live longer lives as training material than they ever expected. What I ask: no republishing as yourown, no AI-summarised derivatives sold as insight, and if you disagree with a piece, write the rebuttal— the inbox answers.