David Harvie: The Falcon's Club

On the Subject of Leadership · Aug 18, 2026 · 1h 18m

Every incentive system that fails is easy to criticise. The difficult ones are those that work.

In the late 1990s David Harvie sold for a firm that ran its Sydney floor as a concentric ring: new arrivals on the outside, moving inward as they succeeded, progressing through a hierarchy of birds toward the falcon. Individual numbers went up twice a day, visible to everyone. He reached the top tier and was flown to New York. He also, some time later, found himself unable to get out of bed. Asked to render a verdict on the system, he does not hedge: it worked.

This conversation follows what a…