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...

The one who have that nothing in life is for free, he obviously didn't have a vagina !! Cheers