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Led by Peter Drucker Simulacrum
Ten tutorials on the work of the chief executive — what the role actually requires — taught not by one author but by a council of those who built the discipline of management or who exemplified its practice. Drucker hosts. The course covers the CEO's irreducible work, vision and execution (Brunel as foil to Musk), strategy, innovation (Christensen), operations and quality (Deming, Ohno), product judgment (Jobs), brand and customer (Ogilvy), decision-making under uncertainty (Kahneman), people and culture (Handy, McGregor), and the inner game.
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Led by Peter Drucker Simulacrum
The question
An orientation to the irreducible work of the chief executive — the work that, if the CEO does not do it, no one else in the organisation will. The module covers the five irreducible functions (defining the business, setting objectives, building the successor team, making the keystone decisions, bridging present to future), what is *not* the CEO's work and the temptations of operational involvement, *what business are we in?* as the foundational question, the CEO as the only person who can authorise the killing of a project, why most CEOs fail at succession, and diagnostic questions for assessing the current state of an organisation.
Outcome
The student can articulate the five irreducible functions of the chief executive in their own words, identify which functions a particular organisation is currently strong or weak on, and distinguish the CEO's irreducible work from the operational work that often consumes their time. (Foundational orientation for the course)
Led by Isambard Kingdom Brunel Simulacrum · in dialogue with the Muskian Disruptor Simulacrum
The question
Founder-driven civilisation-scale projects and what they require. The module covers Brunel's railways and ships, SpaceX and Tesla and the Boring Company, vertical integration as response to inadequate supply chains, personal undelegated authority on engineering decisions, the speed-versus-care trade-off and safety margins, the Brunel-Musk agreement (conventional wisdom too cautious; constraints often inherited not physical) and the Brunel-Musk disagreement (the human cost of speed, what failures actually teach, the engineer's duty to the labourer), the SS Great Eastern as cautionary tale, and what schedule pressure does to design quality.
Outcome
The student can articulate what large-scale founder ambition requires, identify the trade-offs that come with it (particularly around human cost and safety margins), and form their own view on the Brunel-Musk disagreement rather than accepting either as the final word. (Vision and execution)
Led by Peter Drucker Simulacrum
The question
What a strategy actually is — a set of choices with stated alternatives — and how to tell it from an aspirational document. The module covers the inversion test for distinguishing strategy from aspiration, Porter's five forces (rivalry, new entrants, substitutes, buyer power, supplier power), Porter's three generic strategies (cost leadership, differentiation, focus) and the danger of being stuck in the middle, Henry Mintzberg's critique of strategy as emergent rather than planned, the role of the CEO as final arbiter of choice rather than author of slides, and the discipline of saying what you will *not* do.
Outcome
The student can distinguish a real strategy from an aspirational document using the inversion test, name and apply Porter's five forces and three generic strategies, and articulate strategy as a set of choices with the alternatives explicitly stated. (Strategy and position)
Led by Clayton Christensen Simulacrum
The question
Christensen's disruption framework worked through the case material that built the theory. The module covers disruptive vs sustaining innovation, the asymmetric incentive that punishes incumbents for serving current customers well, the four conditions for disruption (low-end opportunity, asymmetric motivation, asymmetric skills, technology improving faster than the market demands), case studies (disk drives, integrated steel mills vs minimills, department stores vs discount retail, traditional vs online education), Jobs-to-Be-Done as the customer-side companion, why a CEO must fund what current customers reject, and organisational separation as the mechanism — not *innovation labs* but autonomous business units with their own P&L.
Outcome
The student can apply the disruption framework to a given market situation, distinguish disruptive from sustaining innovation, identify why an incumbent is structurally vulnerable to a new entrant, and articulate the organisational mechanism (separation, not "innovation initiatives") that allows an incumbent to survive disruption. (Innovation and the Innovator's Dilemma)
Led by W. Edwards Deming Simulacrum · in dialogue with Taiichi Ohno Simulacrum
The question
The operational tradition that most MBA programmes underweight, and what a CEO needs to understand to lead an organisation that actually does anything. The module covers Deming's 14 points and 7 deadly diseases, the 85/15 rule (system vs worker as cause of problems), statistical process control and variation as the enemy of quality, the PDSA cycle, the Toyota Production System (just-in-time, kanban, andon, jidoka, kaizen, gemba), the five whys for root-cause analysis, and the contrast with Taylor's scientific management that Deming and Ohno both critiqued.
Outcome
The student can articulate the core operational concepts (statistical thinking, system causes of problems, PDSA, kanban, andon, kaizen, gemba, five whys), apply the 85/15 rule to a workplace problem, and explain why the operational tradition matters even at the CEO level. (Operations and quality)
Led by Steve Jobs Simulacrum
The question
Focus as the practical discipline of saying no — and the conditions under which a CEO must intervene in product decisions personally rather than delegating. The module covers the cull at Apple in 1997 (forty product lines to four) and the four-quadrant matrix that replaced them, taste — what it is, how it is developed, why it cannot be delegated — the *ten things* exercise (list ten priorities; cull to three), the difference between MVP thinking and product judgment, feature creep as a CEO failure, when to fire a feature champion, and the question *is this insanely great?* as a working tool.
Outcome
The student can articulate focus as the discipline of *no*, identify the conditions under which a CEO must intervene in product decisions personally rather than delegating, and use the cull exercise to prioritise their own organisation's roadmap. (Product judgment)
Led by David Ogilvy Simulacrum
The question
Brand as a promise consistently kept, and the CEO's role as guardian of brand standard across the thousand small decisions. The module covers the customer as intelligent person rather than target market, brand as the cumulative effect of thousands of small decisions, the Ogilvy principles (research first, the big idea, headline that works on its own, image that earns the page), the tagline as test of brand clarity, packaging and customer service as brand decisions, and the discipline of CEO communication (plain language, refusing jargon, reading your own writing the next day). CEOs who speak well (Jobs, early Bezos shareholder letters) and CEOs who do not.
Outcome
The student can articulate brand as a promise consistently kept, identify the role of the CEO in guarding brand standards across the thousand small decisions, and improve their own CEO-level communication using the Ogilvy disciplines. (Brand, customer, communication)
Led by Daniel Kahneman Simulacrum
The question
The science of decision-making applied to the CEO's actual work. The module covers System 1 and System 2 thinking, the biases of executive consequence (planning fallacy, availability, anchoring, sunk cost, confirmation, overconfidence, narrative fallacy), reference-class forecasting using base rates, pre-mortems, the Outside View, structured decision processes that invoke System 2, *what would I have to believe?* as a discipline, the limits of intuition (Kahneman's distinction between domains where intuition is and is not reliable), the role of structured argument and dissent, and Bezos's *disagree and commit* at Amazon.
Outcome
The student can name the major biases that affect executive decision-making, apply at least three structured techniques (reference-class forecasting, pre-mortems, "what would I have to believe?") to their own decisions, and articulate the conditions under which intuition is and is not trustworthy. (Decisions under uncertainty)
Led by Charles Handy Simulacrum · in dialogue with Douglas McGregor Simulacrum
The question
Strategy, products, and processes do not implement themselves — they run on people in cultures of varying health. The module covers McGregor's Theory X and Theory Y, the gap between stated and lived culture, what actually creates culture (CEO behaviour, hiring, promotion decisions, what is rewarded, what is tolerated), Handy's four cultures (power, role, task, person), the limits of culture-change initiatives, Schein's three layers (artefacts, espoused values, underlying assumptions), the founder's outsized role in early-stage culture, and the CEO's calendar as the most honest culture document.
Outcome
The student can distinguish stated from lived culture in their own organisation, apply Handy's four-culture framework to identify which type they are working in, name three concrete CEO behaviours that have outsized cultural effects, and articulate why most attempts to "change culture" fail. (People and culture)
Led by Peter Drucker Simulacrum
The question
The closing module turns inward — the structural pathologies of the CEO role and the inner practices that allow effectiveness to be sustained over years rather than burning out within a few. The module covers Drucker's five disciplines of effectiveness applied to the CEO's life (managing time, focusing on contribution, building on strengths, prioritising, deciding effectively), the loneliness and information-distortion pathologies of the role, the structural difficulty of getting honest feedback once promoted, and the personal practices (reading, exercise, sleep, time off, the people one keeps close) that allow the work to be sustained. The closing exercise produces the student's own working framework.
Outcome
The student can apply Drucker's five disciplines to their own working life, identify the structural pathologies that affect the CEO role, and articulate the inner practices that allow effectiveness in the role to be sustained over years rather than burning out within a few.