Welcome to the Palatine Blog: from research to practice
Why we created this space, what you will find here and how the science of management can replace guesswork in the decisions that really matter.
People who make decisions in high-impact organisations rarely go wrong for lack of effort. Almost always, they go wrong for lack of method. Multimillion-pound decisions are made on the strength of intuition, management fads or the confidence of whoever speaks loudest in the room. This blog exists to offer another way.
Welcome to the Palatine Blog, the place where academic research meets the practice of people who have been under real pressure.
Why this blog exists
Palatine Academy starts from a simple conviction: management decisions should rest on evidence, not on intuition. Our work is to bring managers and executives the scientific rigour of the best British universities, combined with hands-on experience in highly complex corporate and institutional settings.
The Athenaeum and the recorded courses take care of going deeper. The blog plays a different role: it is the front door. Here, knowledge takes the form of an essay, with a clear argument, a reliable source and direct application, to be read calmly and put to use on Monday morning.
Who writes
The texts on this blog draw on the career of Palatine Academy’s founder, Dr Leandro Bolzan de Rezende, and on the academy’s faculty. In brief:
- Education: PhD in Management of Projects from the University of Manchester (United Kingdom), postdoctorate at Lancaster University (United Kingdom), courses in Systems Engineering at Oxford (United Kingdom), in Systems and Requirements Engineering at ITA (Brazil) and in Performance Management & Budget at the Naval Postgraduate School - DRMI (United States), among others.
- Practice: more than 20 years of career as a Brazilian Army officer, working on large-scale programmes and investments.
- Research: hundreds of citations in international research on project management, as well as international and national awards such as the IPMA Young Researcher Award (2020) and the PMI-DF Candango Academic Award (2016).
The full story is on the founder page. Credentials, however, are no substitute for arguments. Every text here has to stand on its own, with data, literature and verifiable reasoning.
What you will find
Our motto sums up the editorial line: the wisdom of the palace and the rigour of the battlefield. That means analytical depth on one side and operational usefulness on the other. The topics we will cover:
- Epistemology of management: what counts as evidence in management and why so much popular practice does not survive serious scrutiny.
- Complexity and megaprojects: why large projects overrun on time and budget, and what research says about avoiding it.
- Governance and P3M: how to prioritise portfolios, programmes and projects so that money and talent follow strategy.
- Decision-making under uncertainty: mental models, biases and heuristics for deciding when data is missing.
- Artificial intelligence in organisations: what is a genuine cognitive amplifier and what is merely superficial productivity.
- Leadership and conduct: the practical application of our Code of Honour, with its values of science, rigour, prudence, loyalty to the facts, honesty and excellence through method.
What we promise
Three commitments guide everything published here:
- Evidence before opinion. When we claim something, we will say where it comes from.
- Clarity before erudition. Rigour does not require jargon. If a concept can be explained simply, it will be.
- Honesty about limits. If the evidence is weak or inconclusive, we will say so, rather than sell certainties that do not exist.
We will not publish to fill a calendar. We will publish when there is something worth your time.
How to follow along
If this path makes sense to you, there are a few ways to join us:
- Subscribe to the newsletter in the footer of this page to receive new texts straight to your inbox.
- Explore the Athenaeum, our library of summaries of scientific articles, book summaries and management tools.
- Discover the Courses, recorded and organised into pathways for those who want to go beyond reading.
- Write to us through the contact page. Questions, criticism and topic suggestions are welcome and help shape the next texts.
Servitium per Sapientiam. Serving through wisdom is what drives us. Thank you for being here.
