Dale McDermott
Strategic Advisor · Writer · HostOn judgement, power and institutions.
Strategic advisory, writing and conversation, from someone who has spent fifteen years studying how power is actually exercised, and advising the people who hold it.
Dale McDermott studies how power is actually exercised: who gets to hold it, what separates real judgement from mere competence, and why capable people fail in the moments that matter most.
The work is discreet by design. The counsel sits with the person who has to make the call, not the audience. What travels between the advisory, the essays and the podcast is a single conviction: judgement matters more than credentials, and institutions are only as strong as the people willing to tell the truth inside them.
The advisory, the essays and the podcast all argue the same thing from different rooms.
The Advisor
Counsel for CEOs, boards and senior leaders in the moments that decide a reputation: succession, scrutiny, and the transitions that do not forgive a bad call. Private, and by invitation.
The Writer
Essays on leadership, power and institutional health that take a position and hold it. No hedging, no house style, just the argument you'd hear if the room were smaller.
Explore The WriterThe Host
Next Round, long-form conversation on business, politics and society, brought to the international stage with the same lens he applies behind closed doors.
Explore The HostJudgement vs. Competence
Why highly qualified leaders fail in the moments that matter most.
The Architecture of Power
How influence actually moves through an organisation, regardless of the org chart.
Institutional Health
Building structures that survive the individual leader.
From the desk.
The First Week: Why Authority Is Claimed, Not Conferred.
Andy Burnham has done more to establish authority in a week than his predecessor managed in two years. The lesson isn't about politics. It's about how power is actually taken.
The Presence Paradox: Why the WFH Debate is a Leadership Failure.
The 'Work From Home' war is not about where we sit. It is a referendum on modern leadership, and right now many leaders are failing the test.
If the decision matters, the conversation is worth having properly.