Organisations rarely fail where their rules say they will. They fail in the space between what is written and what is done: where decisions drift away from the people accountable for them, where a partnership quietly holds more of a company's value than the company does, and where a culture enforces a rule that no policy ever stated. These articles work in that space.
They fall into three groups. The Organisational Gaps series examines governance: each article names a structural gap and offers a diagnostic for boards, risk committees and governance professionals. The strategy and business cases take the same eye to commercial decisions, drawing mostly on Asian companies whose stories are under-told in English. The working across cultures pieces look at how organisations actually behave in the markets where the rules are unwritten.
Organisational Gaps
An ongoing series on how governance fails quietly. Each piece identifies a structural gap and provides a diagnostic for recognising it in your own organisation.
The governance series has its own index, which carries the full set with the diagnostics attached: Organisational Gaps →
It examines where decisions migrate away from the people accountable for them, where governance structures signal assurance they cannot provide, and where silence becomes the dominant mode of institutional choice.
Strategy and business cases
Commercial decisions examined with the same eye. Most of the cases are Asian companies whose stories are rarely told in English, which is part of the point.
The Value That Wouldn't Travel: Burberry, Pepsi and the Asset That Stays Behind – two long partnerships ended within a few years of each other. In Japan the operator shrank by half, in Thailand the brand owner did. Neither was badly run. The difference was which side of the relationship held the value that could not be taken back.
Why Did KPS Video Express Fail? Rewinding Failure in Hong Kong's Video Market – a forensic breakdown of how one of Hong Kong's biggest retail empires collapsed under distributor power, regulatory change, piracy, and the Asian Financial Crisis – all at once.Maria's Bakery: A History of the Rise, Fall, and Revival of a Hong Kong Institution – from 1966 founding to 60+ shops, the 1984 Cake Run, the 1998 collapse, and the revival. How Hong Kong's most beloved bakery brand lived twice.
Working across cultures
How organisations actually behave where the rules are unwritten. Governance, escalation and decision-making as they are practised, not as they are documented.
Reading the Room Across APAC: A Practitioner's Three-Dimensional Model – mapping five APAC markets across pace, warmth, and formality. A working tool, not a taxonomy. What counts as “escalation” varies by market.
In Asia, Ignore Hierarchy at Your Peril – why the org chart matters more than you think, and what it costs to read it as decoration.The 7 Reasons to Work for a Japanese Company in 2026 – job security, training depth, rising wages, and benefits that go beyond the payslip. How the Japanese firm still looks after its own.
The 7 Challenges of Working for a Japanese Company in 2026 – the yen, face time, the glass ceiling, and the gap between progressive and traditional firms.
What's next
Upcoming articles.
- What the exit plan doesn't cover – the strategy literature has understood for decades that value in a partnership can be captured by the other side at exit. The governance frameworks built to manage third-party risk have not caught up.
- The structural gap between expertise and decision-making – why the people who know most often decide least.
- Perceived assurance versus actual assurance in risk oversight – the distance between what a committee believes it provides and what it structurally can.
Related
- The Toyota Production System – governance of a different kind: how Toyota embeds operational discipline through structure rather than oversight.
- Hong Kong Commercial History – the full archive behind the KPS and Maria's Bakery cases: biographies, primary sources, and street-level memories of the brands and institutions that defined post-war Hong Kong.
- Working Across Cultures – the practical companion to the culture pieces above: business cards, running international teams, and the expatriate experience.
This is a living index. New articles appear here as they publish. Each is written to stand alone, but together they make a broader argument about how organisations behave when nobody is watching the gap between the rule and the practice.
Comments