About the Journal

A publication about leadership, change and the work of managing: what organisations are actually trying, what happened when they did, and which of the things everyone repeats turn out to be true.

What this is

Most of what circulates in this field is written by people selling something into it. Vendor blogs cite each other, a figure travels from a press release into a listicle into a slide deck, and by the time anyone looks for the study underneath it there often is not one. Meanwhile the genuinely interesting material, what a particular company actually did and what it cost them, is either behind a paywall or told as a fable.

So the Journal publishes three kinds of thing.

Cases. One organisation, what it changed, and what the outcome data says rather than what the keynote says. Usually the interesting part is the number that stopped being quoted.

Analysis. A question people in this job actually have, answered from the research and the statistics rather than from a survey of 400 self-selected practitioners. Where a widely repeated figure turns out to rest on nothing, we say so.

Signals. A short, curated list of what the analysts, researchers and practitioners worth following have just published, each with a line from us on why it is there. We link out and we do not republish. It lives at /signals.

Who writes it

Articles are written and checked by the Modern Leadership Journal Editorial Desk. We sign as a desk rather than under an individual byline, because the pieces are researched, drafted and verified by more than one pair of hands and a single name would be a convenient fiction.

What we do not do is invent people. There is no stock-photo editor-in-chief on this site and no author profile that dissolves under a search. Where an article needs the judgement of a named expert, it quotes one: a real, publicly identifiable researcher or practitioner, in their own words, with a link to where they published them. The same applies to Signals, where the whole point is that somebody real wrote the thing we are pointing at. Those rules are in our editorial standards.

How it is funded

The Journal is commissioned work, funded by a company active in the market it covers. That arrangement pays for the reporting. It does not buy verdicts, and nobody outside the desk reads an article before it is published.

The rule we hold ourselves to follows from that: where the Journal compares providers, every provider is assessed against the same published evidence, and a claim that cannot be verified independently is reported as a claim whoever is making it. The full version, including what happens when the evidence favours somebody we have no relationship with, is in the editorial standards.

Dates and revisions

Every article carries the date it was published and the date it was last checked against its sources. When a figure is superseded we update the article and move the check date. Where a source turns out not to support what was written, we say what changed rather than editing it away.