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Across Australian education, workforce sustainability has become an urgent concern.  Teacher shortages, staff retention, workload pressures and leadership burnout are increasingly shaping conversations about the future of schools. Much of the response has understandably focused on attracting more people into the profession, filling vacancies and strengthening workforce planning.  These are essential priorities. But they address […]

Complex environments rarely offer leaders a clear path.  Information is incomplete. Conditions change. Decisions create unintended consequences. Different people hold different views of both the problem and the solution.  Leaders cannot always wait for certainty before acting. So what guides them?  This is one of the questions being explored through the ANU Leadership & Complexity

What happens when leadership no longer comes with a title, position or institutional protection?  In Episode 5 of Purpose: Leading into the Future, former diplomat and Chief of Staff to Australia’s Deputy Prime Minister, Jo Tarnawsky, reflects on one of leadership’s most difficult tests: what it means to act with integrity when systems become unsafe,

Leadership in an age of fragility. For many years, leadership thinking has centred on the idea of resilience. Shock. Adaptation. Recovery. Return. But many leaders are beginning to recognise something different. Some systems no longer bounce back the way they once did. They continue functioning — but with less capacity, less trust, and less margin

The Menzies Leadership Foundation and Global Voices have selected Arya Moodley, Ashton Shurey and Pooja Zinzuwadia to represent Australia at the United Nations General Assembly Sixth Committee in New York, 5–9 October 2026. The Sixth Committee is the principal forum through which the General Assembly considers questions of international law. It is where states debate

Australian health and medtech innovation has enormous potential, but too often the pathway from early promise to global scale remains difficult to navigate. HESTA’s anchor investment in Synthesis Capital marks an important step in strengthening the capital pathways, specialist support and ecosystem conditions needed to help high-potential ventures grow.  Synthesis Capital has been established as

At a time when leadership is too often measured by visibility, authority or influence, Charlotte Ree’s recent reflection in The Weekend Australian Magazine offers a timely reminder of something more fundamental: leadership begins with knowing what we stand for.  Values are not soft ideals or words we place on a wall. They are the principles

What guides leadership when compliance is no longer enough? In Episode 4 of Purpose: Leading into the Future, Michael Saadie — CEO of JBWere and Head of NAB Private Wealth — explores the relationship between leadership, judgement and responsibility in environments where decisions cannot be reduced to policy or process alone. Set against the backdrop

What does leadership demand when affordability becomes a daily pressure formillions of families? In Episode 3 of Purpose: Leading into the Future, Callum Smith — Chief Commercial Officerat Kmart Australia and New Zealand — explores what it means to lead at the frontline ofeconomic pressure, where decisions about price, supply chains and customer value shapeeveryday

When responsibility shifts, but authority does not. Leadership has not disappeared.It has relocated. Across organisations, communities, and civic life, leadership work increasingly falls to people who were never formally given the role — and rarely given the authority to match. This shift is often described as the rise of distributed or collective leadership. In practice,