Jozef Imrich, name worthy of Kafka, has his finger on the pulse of any irony of interest and shares his findings to keep you in-the-know with the savviest trend setters and infomaniacs.
''I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.''
-Kurt Vonnegut
The Crown’s star witness, who was given an indemnity against prosecution in return for giving evidence against his former boss, ex-NSW minister Tony Kelly, has told a District Court jury that due to health issues, “I can’t remember anything about anything.”
Trump Publishes Enemies List To White House Website
TechDirt: “…Here’s how the administration leads into its hit list of Democratic politicians(emphasis in the original): The carnage in Dallas, Texas — where a maniac with “ANTI-ICE” ammo gunned down an ICE field office in an attack clearly targeted at ICE personnel — lays bare the deadly consequences of Democrats’ unhinged crusade against our border enforcement.
Democrats have spent years vilifying ICE as “fascists,” “the Gestapo,” and “slave patrols,” inciting a 1,000% surge in assaults on agents and a wave of Radical Left terror. Their words aren’t just reckless — they’re a battle cry for violence. Never mind the fact that the gunman managed to kill/injure more immigrants than ICE officers — something that might suggest immigrants were the real target, no matter what investigators claimed to have found scrawled on some unused bullets.
And never mind the fact that Trump loves fascism if he gets to be the guy doing it, and would definitely love to have a Gestapo of his own to enforce his will. The concepts embodied by this version of ICE are all of things they’re being described as, which Trump now claims (using a particularly meaningless statistic) will result in violence against… well, encroaching fascism and Gestapo-esque tactics?
If you want to read the full list of official White House enemies, go ahead and click through. But it’s nothing you haven’t seen before, even as recently as last week when the DHS did the same thing because people weren’t being deferential enough to the thuggery that makes up ICE’s daily activities…”
Business leaders should be careful of the people they pretend to be – because then they have to remember who that is.
7 Oct 2025
Some of the more colourful pitches I have received from chief executives wanting to be interviewed by the Financial Times include former athletes who made it to the boardroom; bosses who had a deprived childhood; and interns, apprentices, or cleaners who battled their way to the corner office.
I picture these leaders in confabs with their increasingly desperate PR people: “Surely there must be something interesting in your background?” Once the publicists unearth a nugget, they refine and polish it into a “unique” origin story and offer their client up as an “opportunity”.
I have bad news for the spinners. Not only are few of these pitches unique, they are largely falling on deaf ears. While I have interviews in the pipeline with a practising priest and a former national sporting star, it was not these leaders’ backstories that made them stand out.
The announcement last week that GSK chief executive Emma Walmsley was to step down sent me back to news of her appointment in 2016.
She seems to have felt no need to spin a good story about her background. The best journalists could dig out was the far from unique insight that she enjoyed yoga and an occasional glass of wine and had four young children.
I have bad news for the spinners. Not only are few of these pitches unique, they are largely falling on deaf ears. While I have interviews in the pipeline with a practising priest and a former national sporting star, it was not these leaders’ backstories that made them stand out.
The announcement last week that GSK chief executive Emma Walmsley was to step down sent me back to news of her appointment in 2016.
She seems to have felt no need to spin a good story about her background. The best journalists could dig out was the far from unique insight that she enjoyed yoga and an occasional glass of wine and had four young children.
She may be the exception that proves the rule that men – or women – “can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning”, as George Eliotwrote in the epigraph to her last novel Daniel Deronda. Business leaders’ self-image and confidence are often founded on the stories they tell themselves about where they came from.
Sometimes these intertwine with the origin stories of companies, such as the famous Palo Alto garage where Bill Hewlett and Dave Packarddeveloped their first products.
A 2020 study for the journal Human Relations, called “The stories that make us”, explores how leaders use such tales to “make sense” of their leadership.
Politicians are particularly prone to outdoing each other with descriptions of their hardscrabble roots, like the four Yorkshiremen in the Monty Python sketch.
“Remembered” stories can shape how the leader behaves, the researchers point out, but an evolving leader will also often revise their origin story to fit their own changing motives and behaviour.
As a journalist, I am loath to admit such revisions are probably necessary. An entrepreneurial CEO once told me, in colourful detail, how he had convinced a man to sell him the company that he later built into an empire.
My attempts to verify this often-told tale failed when a former business partner who had been present declined to comment. But after the story appeared, to my frustration, the witness finally contacted me to point out some slight inaccuracies: my interviewee had combined elements from various meetings to make a more newsworthy narrative.
Leaders who do not regularly revisit their origin stories risk becoming locked into behaviour that no longer suits their purpose.
In fact, as scholar Herminia Ibarra has written in Act Like a Leader, Think Like A Leader, “authenticity traps” like this may prevent some would-be leaders from stepping up to a more senior position. They never advance because they are trying to be “true” to their past self, rather than a possible future them.
In his new book Don’t Be Yourself, Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic pulls down the cult of authenticity. He argues it “oversimplifies human complexity, disregards the necessity of compromise, and leaves us ill-equipped to navigate the nuanced realities of modern life”.
His epigraph comes from another novelist, Kurt Vonnegut: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
Leadership pretence has plenty of pitfalls. Touching up your backstory for a PR pitch, or “faking it to make it” by simulating the confidence you need to become a leader, seems innocuous. Falsifying the record completely – say, by fabricating qualifications – is another matter.
Still, as Premuzic explained to me, it is hard enough for leaders to know their own selves, let alone for those outside to judge whether the personas they wear in public are true.
He suggests outsiders trying to judge a manager, chief executive or political leader should focus less on the image they project and more on what they have done – such as the achievements that earned Walmsley the job at GSK and should help her secure a new role.
“Ultimately, we have no way to determine who you truly are, top down,” says Premuzic. But he warns: “The lazier we become and the more we want to rely on our gut feeling … the less we look at [your] record and actions.”
Auditor cancelled, firms fined in ASIC independence review
Edmund Tadros Oct 7, 2025
The corporate regulator says major auditing firms are breaching long-standing independence rules, leading to one auditor cancelling his registration, a fine for Nexia Perth and orders made against Hall Chadwick.
An Australian Securities and Investments Commission review of 48 auditors from 19 audit firms found nine had failed to comply with rules requiring them to rotate auditors among clients to ensure independence, and that five had relationships that were “explicitly prohibited under the Corporations Act because they are considered inherently non-independent”.
ASIC commissioner Kate O’Rourke warned auditors are failing “basic independence requirements” and warned them to “think more critically about whether they are independent”. Rhett Wyman
The findings come after ASIC issued a scathing report card scrutinising the $4.3 trillion super industry and the country’s major auditing firms’ processes to value unlisted assets.
Auditors must be independent of the clients they are auditing because investors rely upon them to attest that the client’s financial accounts are a fair reflection of their financial position.
“Auditor independence underpins stakeholder trust and confidence in the audit process and the reliability of the financial information being audited,” ASIC commissioner Kate O’Rourke said.
“Unfortunately, our review found that many auditors failed to meet the basic independence requirements, and others failed to identify and critically evaluate potential threats to their independence.
“It is not enough for auditors to adopt a tick-a-box approach to complying with these important obligations. They must think more critically about whether they are independent and be alive to even the perception that their independence is compromised.”
Compliance failings
ASIC last month accepted an application by Allan William Donald to cancel his registration after the regulator said he “did not comply with the independence requirements of auditors under the Corporations Act 2001” and the industry’s code of ethics.
Donald had become auditor for two related large proprietary companies between 1992 and 2022, while also acting as company secretary for the audited bodies.
In addition to this “prohibited relationship”, ASIC found he also provided prohibited non-assurance services to the clients and maintained “a long association with the audit clients without adequate independence threat assessments and safeguards in place”.
Earlier this month, ASIC fined Nexia Perth Audit $78,250 for providing prohibited services to a client.
The regulator alleged that the firm “provided tax calculation services involving the preparation of current and deferred tax liabilities and assets” for the listed company, a move which created the threat that the firm would review its own work. Nexia earned $4500 for the banned work.
Auditor rotation breaches
ASIC also accepted three court enforceable undertakings from current and former Hall Chadwick (NSW) partners earlier this month over multiple auditor rotation breaches.
The regulator said that between 2019 and 2023, “Drew Townsend and former partners Sandeep Kumar and Graham Webb” admitted “they acted as lead auditor on a combined 14 occasions across 8 listed companies when they were not eligible to do so”.
Auditors can act as the lead auditor of a listed company for five years, with an extension of up to two years allowed under certain circumstances. ASIC said that the three men had continued their lead auditing role for their clients beyond the allowed time frame.
Hall Chadwick (NSW) agreed to hire an independent expert to review and improve its quality management systems.
Big four consultancies Deloitte, EY, KPMG and PwC are among the firms included in the review, as well as national firms BDO, Grant Thornton, RSM and William Buck.
