There is a particular kind of silence in a hostel at 4 a.m. — the silence of fifty other lives sleeping through what feels like your defining hour. I learned to think in that silence. I learned, also, that the environment you are placed in shapes the questions you are able to ask.
I grew up in a country where the answer to "what should I become" had a short list of acceptable shapes. The shape I chose — researcher, teacher, person who asks why people do what they do at work — was not on the list. So I took it with me. To Singapore. To the United Kingdom. And, eventually, to Adelaide, where I write to you from now.
§ I — Singapore, 2008
First lectures, first awards, first lessons in restraint.
My first teaching post arrived earlier than I had any right to expect. I was twenty-six and I thought I had something to prove. The students taught me, very quickly, that what I had to prove was less interesting than what they were trying to understand. Restraint became the lesson.
The teaching awards came, then, not from being clever — there are more clever people than there is time — but from a stubborn refusal to perform the role of "professor" in any way I didn't believe in. Be honest, or don't bother. That sentence was already in my head by then.
There is no such thing as a demotivated person. Motivation never disappears — it simply redirects.
§ II — The United Kingdom, 2014
A PhD, and a slow turn toward the questions that mattered.
The PhD was not the romance people imagine. It was four years of incremental, often invisible, work — and the slow, important realisation that the questions I cared about (psychosocial safety, reflexivity, leadership, the human side of family firms) sat at the intersection of disciplines that did not yet talk to each other.
My first FT50 paper came out of that intersection. It was, in many ways, a paper about families that pray together — and what those families could teach business schools about value transmission. It was published in the Journal of Business Ethics in 2020. It is still the paper I am most often asked about. It is also the paper that taught me to write for humans first and reviewers second.
The Financial Times' list of fifty journals used as benchmarks for top business schools. Publication here is the academic equivalent of being on a particular shortlist — quiet, slow, and disproportionately consequential.
"I am, on most days, less interested in being right than in being honest about what I do not yet know."
§ III — Australia, 2019 — present
Adelaide, and the practice of long, quiet work.
Adelaide was not a strategic move. It was the city that offered the conditions — psychological, intellectual, geographic — for the long, quiet work I wanted to do next. I supervise PhD students here. I teach. I co-lead a research stream on psychosocial safety. I write.
The podcast, Breaking Mental Models, was the natural consequence of a decade of writing things in journals that nobody outside academia ever read. The first episode aired this year, with Asher Wright. There will be more. I record them the way I write — with the assumption that the listener is intelligent, busy, and uninterested in being flattered.
§ IV — What I'm still trying to learn
The environment is the intervention.
If there is a single sentence the last thirty years have taught me, it is this: change the environment, sustain it, and the transformation follows. Neither the water nor the ice chose to change. They responded to the environment they were placed in, and they stayed in it long enough.
I am still learning, slowly, what that means for how I teach, how I research, and how I show up — in the lecture hall, in front of a microphone, and in the quiet 4 a.m. silence I still occasionally find myself in.
— A. A.
Adelaide · May 2026