The theatre around us insists that every initiative is a learning journey and every setback is growth.

I call it what it is: Performative Compliance, for that’s the space they end up operating in, eventually.

Initiatives fail for familiar reasons – irrational stakeholders, withdrawn resources, and politics overruling strategy. Sun Tzu and Niccolò Machiavelli understood this centuries ago.

Modern leadership thinking prefers to pretend it doesn’t exist.

I am the realist in a room full of performers.
I’m the author of five books, including an International Bestseller Sun Tzu’s Art of War in the Battlefield of Project Management – Book II of the Warrior Quest trilogy. Since founding JustPMBlog.com in 2009, I’ve translated ancient strategic principles into modern organizational reality – focusing on what actually works when initiatives collide with politics, ambiguity, and unspoken incentives.

I also write The Footnote, a weekly satire that dissects professional absurdities through The Natural Laws of Bullshit. Every Monday, I surface one invisible rule that keeps corporate nonsense in disciplined, self-sustaining motion. Anchored in The Anatomy of Nonsense also known as The Grand Unified Theory of Bullshit, The Footnote is written for professionals fluent in the art of nodding while thinking otherwise. It has become my most important work for so far for a simple reason: humor reveals patterns that formal analysis is often too polite to name.

My writing blends Sun Tzu’s strategic clarity, Machiavelli’s political realism, and a sharp critique of corporate performance art. More recently, I have embraced the transformative edge of satire. PM POKES is one such work, circulated selectively, because not everyone has the appetite for humour that cuts close to the truth.

The satire deflates ego – the kind that invents rituals, wastes time, and quietly erodes trust. The analysis delivers practical frameworks centered on what improves outcomes: intent, alignment, trade-offs, cadence, and evidence.

I write for experienced professionals – cynical enough to see through the theatre, serious enough to want tools that work.

If you’re done with transformation theatre and ready for strategic realism, you’re in the right place.

Start with subscribing to The Footnote.