Books
Stories about systems and the people inside them.
I’m completing two business books and a body of fiction that explores the same questions from other angles. Join the list, and you’ll hear first when each one is published.
Business Books
Coming Soon - Ask for the Receipt
Organisations audit a taxi fare down to the cent, then spend millions on ideas nobody has checked. Ask for the Receipt tests more than thirty of them, from Myers-Briggs and learning styles to open-plan offices, return-to-office mandates and “AI-first” strategy. It gives a clear verdict on each, says what works instead, and offers eight questions that cut through the next big framework.
“Nobody has ever given a keynote called We Started Writing Down Our Defects.”
Coming Soon - Nobody Here is Stupid
Clever people make stupid decisions all the time, and it’s rarely because they’re stupid. From Challenger to Theranos to Robodebt, Nobody Here Is Stupid shows how pay plans, rosters, meetings and hierarchies make the stupid choice the sensible one, and who designs them that way. It’s sharp, funny and rigorously sourced, about the rooms we work in and the ones we build.
“Stupidity is manufactured. It has suppliers, a production line and, occasionally, a bonus scheme”
Coming Soon - On the Importance of Swearing
Why does every language need its worst words? Business linguist Brett Rutledge, a Kiwi in Melbourne, shows how swearing bonds teams, dulls pain and reveals what we hold sacred, and why Aussies swear best while Kiwis understand it best. Funny, fascinating and fully sourced. Except the important bit.
The surprisingly serious, seriously funny case for swearing, from the country’s only business linguist.
Novels
Coming Soon - The Long Becoming
Monster or nothing: a grieving parent’s verdict on whatever runs the world, carried from a hospital corridor into death. There waits a Voice that cannot lie, with an impossible offer: become that thing. A fallible god, every living thing in a world, corridors and all. What follows is a conversation through the lives the soul has already lived, and a decision only it can make.
Coming Soon - Akeldama
Magdala, AD 81. Loukas, a physician from Antioch, comes to gather eyewitness accounts for his gospel. Miriam of Magdala, now eighty-three, agrees to talk if he writes down everything she tells him about Yehudah of Qeriyot, the friend the world calls Judas. Over eighteen days, she gives him the story as she saw it. He believes her. The hard part is the book.
Coming Soon - Which True Thing
Rachel Kerr judges credibility for a living. Everything she knows about her mother, who died when Rachel was four, came from her brother Tommy, the only one who was there. When a grocery list and a half-remembered song don’t fit his account, she starts checking him. This is a novel about memory, trust and the damage you can do without ever telling a lie.
Short Stories
Coming Soon - Nobody Thanks a Keeper
Ten stories about the work nobody sees. A repairman’s daughter inherits his shop and his habits. A miner reads about rain he has never felt. A spirit holds humanity back from the edge with a single word. Backup singers carry a star, a locksmith gives his luck away, and Love and Fate bet on a footbridge. Nobody thanks a keeper.
Coming Soon - Tap to Claim
Coming Soon - Seven Deadly Streams
Seven sins. Seven platforms. Seven ordinary Australians and New Zealanders who wanted a little more: more views, more kudos, more money, more of the last word. And after each story, the meeting where the people who built the platforms agree it was tragic. Darkly funny and quietly devastating.
Stories about people trapped inside systems that will carry on without them. An online vigilante who becomes the mob she hunts. An insurance executive whose machine never says no. A lottery winner ruled by his own rules. A council newcomer who learns the game too well. None of them breaks the system. They build their own, and it works just like the old one.
Be the first to read them
One email when each book is published.
Nothing else unless you ask for it.