The archive
All articles
Everything the Journal has published, newest first. Each piece names its sources and carries the date it was last checked.
- Leadership Development
Is 360-degree feedback worth what it costs?
The largest meta-analysis of leadership training found no advantage for 360-degree feedback over feedback from a single source, on any outcome it could test.
- Coaching & AI
What does the AI Act require of HR and coaching tools now?
Inferring employees' emotions with AI has been banned since February 2025. The high-risk duties for recruitment tools moved to December 2027.
- Coaching & AI
Does AI coaching work as well as a human coach?
The study behind the parity claim compared two trials run two years apart. A direct randomised comparison found effects only for human coaching.
- Change & Transformation
What the Buurtzorg case actually proves about self-managing teams
Its nurses deliver home care in 108 hours a year against 168 elsewhere. Once hospital and physician costs are added, the total per client is average.
- Change & Transformation
Where does the 70 percent change failure rate come from?
A peer-reviewed review traced the claim through five published sources and found no evidence behind any of them. Its originators called it unscientific.
- Change & Transformation
Which change management model has evidence behind it?
None of the three most used models has been tested against a control group. What separates them is not effectiveness but what kind of claim each is entitled to make.
- Coaching & AI
How big is the coaching industry, and what is it made of?
The 5.34 billion dollar figure is the sum of what 110,492 practitioners earned. The average is 49,283 dollars a year from about four billable hours a week.
- Leadership Development
How much do employers actually spend to train one person?
Across the EU, employers spent 1,433 euro per training participant in 2020, against 1,488 in 2005. Adjusted for inflation that is a fall of 24 percent.
- Coaching & AI
Does coaching work? Three meta-analyses, and what they agree on
Pooled effects for workplace coaching fall from about 0.6 to about 0.4 as the studies get more rigorous. All three reviews find session count predicts nothing.
- Leadership Development
Does leadership training work, and what does it change?
A meta-analysis of 335 samples found leadership training improves on-the-job behaviour with a corrected effect of 0.82, the largest of the four outcomes it measured.
- Talent & Retention
What makes the first management job so hard?
Development has its strongest measured effect on behaviour at the junior end, and that is the level where budgets are thinnest and the role has changed most.
- Coaching & AI
How many coaching sessions does someone actually need?
Three meta-analyses have tested session count against outcomes. None found a relationship. Coaching is still bought and priced almost entirely by the session.
- Coaching & AI
Are external coaches better than internal ones?
The only meta-analysis to test it found internal coaches produced stronger effects. The finding rests on seventeen studies and runs against how the market is priced.
- Change & Transformation
What is Kotter's eight-step model actually based on?
A ten-year observation of a hundred companies, and by the author's own account no examples or major ideas from any published source but his own writing.
- Leadership Development
How do you measure whether a leadership programme worked?
The four-level model behind most evaluation dates from 1959 and the levels do not predict each other. A programme can score well on three of them and change nothing.
- Change & Transformation
Did Kurt Lewin ever propose the unfreeze, change, refreeze model?
A 2016 paper in Human Relations argues he never developed it and that it took form after his death. A 2020 reply argues the model is implicit in his field theory.
- Talent & Retention
Why is manager engagement falling faster than everyone else's?
Gallup put manager engagement at 22 percent in 2025, down five points in a year and nine since 2022. Overall engagement moved one point over the same year.
- Talent & Retention
Do people really leave managers, not companies?
The figure behind the slogan measures variance in engagement between business units, not why anyone resigned. It is restated four times on the way to the slide.
- Leadership Development
What do firms of different sizes spend on training?
Large European employers spend 859 euro per head of workforce on training. Firms with 10 to 49 staff spend 342. The participation gap is wider than the money gap.
- Change & Transformation
Zappos removed its managers. What happened next
210 of 1,503 employees took the buyout rather than continue. The company later stepped back from the model, and the person who led the rollout co-wrote the caution.
