Pen Thoughts

  Nobody punished me for speaking up. They laughed. She was punished, after twenty-one years. Two lessons from the same system, and a third one it teaches everyone else. A scandal treated as a scandal In June, I watched a report about KPMG Australia and wrote a short piece about it, When the Auditors Are Not Audited . The story deserves to be told in full, because I only told half of it. KPMG, one of the four largest accounting firms in the world, audited the property group Lendlease for nearly seventy years. That work gave its auditors access to Lendlease's confidential board papers, which contained bids rival firms had submitted to win the work. In May 2024, an employee raised a complaint inside the firm. Partners, the employee said, had used those papers to chase audit contracts at other companies, including the bank Westpac and the property group Dexus. The firm investigated itself and found nothing. The whistleblower did not stop. The complaint went to the regulator, and t...

    The fisherman In 2014 I read a small book, one of those pocket-sized management fables in the same family as Who Moved My Cheese? I no longer have it, and I cannot remember its title. I remember one story from it, because I wrote about it on this blog that year . A man is fishing from his boat when he sees a snake with a frog in its mouth. He feels sorry for the frog, so he reaches down, takes it from the snake and lets it go. Then he feels sorry for the snake, which has lost its meal. He has no food on board, only a bottle of bourbon, so he pours a few drops into the snake's mouth. The snake swims away happy. A few minutes later, something knocks against the side of the boat. The fisherman looks down. The snake is back, with two frogs. The story is most often credited to the management writer Michael LeBoeuf, whose book rested on a single principle: the things that get rewarded get done. When I first read it, I took the lesson most people take. The fisherman meant well, ...

Rot and Renewal, week nine. What I concluded about organisations in January 2020, and what six years did to that conclusion. The road to Riad el Solh The uprising began on the evening of 17 October 2019, after the government announced it would tax petrol, tobacco and WhatsApp calls. I wanted to go that first night. My wife Jihane asked me not to, and I stayed home. By the second evening staying home was not possible. I apologised to her and took the car, a Jeep Liberty assigned to me by the organisation I worked for, which turned out to be the right vehicle for that road. I had never seen my own city look like that. Rubbish containers burning in the middle of the carriageway. Roadblocks every few hundred metres. The smell of fire and burnt tyres. Darkness, because the power was cut, so the only light came from whatever was alight. I drove at walking pace, bumping over rocks and shredded tyres and whatever else angry people had dragged into the road. There were people standing on b...

  Rot and Renewal, week eight. Two institutions that came back, and the difference between the two ways it happened. The road south On the night of 29 November 2010 I drove into the south of Lebanon for the first time in my life, following a location someone had sent me on Google Maps, which most of us had only started using that year. I had been driving for close to two hours and still had half an hour to go. The phone was the only thing that knew where I was going, and the phone was dying. I stopped at a kiosk in a village whose name I never learned, in an area I had been quietly warned about all my life. I asked if there was somewhere to plug in a charger. A man showed me the socket, then brought me a bottle of water I had not asked for. Ten or so men were sitting in front of a television. I looked up to see what they were watching and it was the Clásico. Barcelona were dismantling Real Madrid at the Camp Nou. It finished five goals to nothing. I stayed for it. I laughed wi...

  Rot and Renewal. Twenty years in this sector, and a question nobody at the table wanted. The table was the first thing I noticed. One slab of wood, beautifully made, longer than my office. The chairs were hydraulic, with a lever under the seat so you could raise or lower yourself, and I remember thinking I would like one of those for my desk. Then I thought the table had probably cost more than I earn in a year. Then I decided to stop thinking about the table. This was a sector coordination meeting on livelihoods and social stability. Thirty or so project coordinators, sector leads, a few technical advisers. Everyone spoke English. Not because English was anyone's first language, but because it was the only way to be certain that no international colleague present was excluded from the conversation. I have sat in dozens of these meetings over the years. I have never once heard the reverse consideration raised. When my turn came, I said something I thought was ordinary. I said tha...