An independent executive journal about the decisions that shape organisations, and about what remains once the noise has been sifted out.
Why "Qalbur"
In Turkish, a kalbur is a sieve. After the harvest, grain is passed through it to separate what is worth keeping from the dust, husks and stones that came in with it. It is a simple tool, and an old one, but it does something that cannot be skipped: nothing useful can be made from grain that has not first been separated from what surrounds it.
Qalbur takes its name and its purpose from that work.
Senior leaders are rarely short of information. They receive reports, forecasts, research, advice, opinions and trends in quantities no one can absorb. The difficulty is separating what deserves attention from what merely occupies it: which evidence is sound, which assumptions are being treated as facts, and which development actually changes a decision.
The name also echoes qalb, the word for heart. That echo is deliberate. Organisations are economic institutions, but they are also human ones, and a journal about executive decisions that forgot the people who live with their consequences would be sieving the wrong material.
What Qalbur is
Qalbur is an independent executive journal about leadership, strategy, organisational transformation, commercial judgement, international business and the changing world of work.
It is written for people whose decisions carry consequences beyond their own roles: Board members, CEOs and Managing Directors, C-suite executives, VPs, Directors and Heads of Function, and experienced managers preparing for greater responsibility.
Its starting point is an observation that becomes clearer with seniority. Important business problems rarely stay inside the categories in which organisations first describe them. A technology decision may begin as an investment case and turn into a question of organisational capability. A growth strategy may look commercially attractive until capital, talent and execution capacity are considered together. A restructuring may improve the cost base while quietly weakening institutional memory. A transformation that appears rational on a programme plan may alter trust, authority and dependency in ways that become visible only years later.
Executive decisions do not produce isolated outcomes. They change systems. Qalbur exists to examine those systems, the assumptions beneath them and the consequences that are not yet visible when a decision is made.
The questions Qalbur examines
The journal is organised around seven areas. The boundaries between them are deliberately porous, because the problems they describe rarely respect organisational charts.
Leadership
Leadership is examined through authority, judgement, accountability, trust and organisational behaviour. The focus is on what happens when someone holds the power to allocate resources, set priorities, appoint people, tolerate certain behaviours and make decisions whose consequences others must live with. Personality and inspiration matter far less here than the use of that power.
Strategy
Strategy concerns consequential choices about markets, customers, competition, capability, capital and long-term position. Qalbur is particularly interested in the distance between an attractive strategic proposition and an organisation's actual ability to execute it.
Transformation
Transformation begins where strategy meets reality. Existing structures, incentives, technology, politics, culture, skills and institutional memory all shape what an organisation can change, how quickly, and what it may lose along the way. The difficult transformation questions are rarely technological alone. They concern capability, power, behaviour and time.
Growth
Growth is examined through commercial judgement: customers, markets, business development, partnerships, pricing and the economics of expansion. More revenue does not automatically create a stronger business. Growth can build capability, and it can also consume capital, dilute focus, increase dependency and expose weaknesses that a smaller organisation was able to hide. The quality of growth matters as much as its rate.
People & Culture
Culture is often discussed as though it were an atmosphere. In practice, people experience it through decisions. Who receives authority? Which behaviour is rewarded? What happens when someone disagrees? Who is promoted, protected or blamed? What knowledge disappears when experienced people leave? Qalbur treats culture as accumulated organisational evidence rather than corporate language.
Executive Career
Senior careers become less linear as responsibility grows. Moving from Director to VP, changing industries or countries, inheriting broader commercial responsibility, or entering an unfamiliar organisational culture demands more than just another set of career techniques. Qalbur examines how judgement, reputation, adaptability, and self-knowledge develop over an executive career, including periods when progress is less orderly than the conventional career story suggests.
Future of Work
Artificial intelligence, automation and new organisational models are redistributing knowledge, authority and responsibility inside companies. Which tasks technology can perform is the easier question. The harder ones concern what happens to judgement when information becomes abundant, which capabilities organisations should continue to own, where human accountability must remain explicit, and how leadership changes when machines take part in analysis and decision-making.
From information to interpretation
If the sieve is the image, this is the method.
A substantial Qalbur article tries, where the subject allows, to bring together three forms of understanding: research evidence, operating evidence and executive interpretation.
Research establishes what can reasonably be supported. Operating experience tests whether an attractive theory survives contact with organisations, markets, customers, incentives and human behaviour. Executive interpretation asks what follows: what the evidence means for a decision, which trade-offs remain, and what consequences may appear beyond the current reporting period.
These forms of knowledge are related, but they are not interchangeable. A genuine personal experience does not become universal evidence simply because it happened. Research may identify a strong general pattern without telling one particular company what to do. Interpretation always involves judgement. Keeping those distinctions visible is part of the discipline.
The same discipline applies to fashionable ideas. Qalbur does not assume that popular management thinking is wrong, nor that prevailing practice is right because respected organisations repeat it. The useful starting point is examination. What does the evidence support? Where does experience complicate the theory? Under what conditions would the opposite argument be stronger?
Sometimes that examination produces a clear conclusion. At other times the most useful outcome is a more precise understanding of the trade-off. Executive maturity is rarely the elimination of ambiguity. More often it is the ability to make a responsible decision while recognising what remains uncertain.
Commercial reality belongs in the leadership conversation
Leadership is sometimes discussed as though it sits above economics.
It does not.
Poor organisational judgement eventually appears somewhere: in cost, lost customers, weakened capability, slower execution, unnecessary risk, declining trust or reduced competitiveness. The reverse is equally true. Decisions made purely for immediate financial efficiency can erode knowledge, resilience and institutional capacity that took years to build.
Qalbur therefore connects human and organisational questions with their commercial consequences, without reducing every discussion to quarterly economics. Senior leadership has to hold both realities at once, and so does this journal.
International by experience and by design
Business does not work the same way everywhere. Authority is exercised differently. In some environments trust must be established before any commercial discussion begins; in others it emerges through performance. Decision speed, hierarchy, negotiation, directness, regulation and attitudes to risk can vary materially between countries, institutions and even divisions of the same company.
These differences matter most when organisations expand across borders or lead teams, customers and partners in several markets at once. Much of the experience behind Qalbur comes from exactly those settings: European industrial companies, Middle Eastern and Gulf markets, African and CIS environments, and the negotiations and misunderstandings that happen between them.
International perspective stops being useful when it hardens into national stereotypes. Culture explains tendencies. It does not explain every individual, company or decision. Qalbur treats context as something to understand rather than a label to apply.
Who writes Qalbur
Qalbur was founded and is written by Andy Demir, an international commercial leader with more than two decades of global experience across more than twelve sectors, from semiconductors, aerospace, defence and space to renewable energy, hydrogen, quantum computing, cyber security, finance and commodity trade, and across the Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia and the Gulf.
That work has spanned almost every business function, from modest to multi-billion contracts, and signature space-exploration programmes connected with the Moon and Mars. It has meant working between technical and commercial teams, between headquarters and local markets, and between very different ideas of how authority and trust should work.
Those experiences shape the questions asked here. They are not presented as universal answers.
A note from the founder
I started Qalbur because I kept seeing the same pattern across very different organisations and countries: decisions that looked sound in the room where they were made, and consequences that arrived later, somewhere else, for someone else. The information needed to anticipate those consequences was usually available. What was missing was the time and discipline to separate it from everything around it. Qalbur is my attempt to do that sifting in public, carefully enough that experience becomes judgement rather than anecdote, and honestly enough to admit when I am uncertain or wrong.
— Andy Demir
How Qalbur is written
Articles take several forms. Flagship analyses examine a significant executive question in depth. Executive Briefings address a narrower issue more quickly. Reading Notes discuss individual books critically rather than summarising them. Boardroom Questions set out the questions a leadership team should ask before a decision, rather than after.
Each article begins with the author's own subject, research, argument and experience. AI tools are then used to check facts and sources, test the reasoning and refine the text. The judgement and the responsibility for everything published remain the author's.
Qalbur is editorially independent. No article's conclusions are sponsored, and where affiliate links to books are used, they are disclosed and never influence the judgement of the book.
What Qalbur leaves in the sieve
There is already an abundance of management content designed to be consumed quickly and forgotten just as quickly. Qalbur has little reason to add to it.
What stays behind in the sieve is familiar: motivational slogans, recycled executive advice, frameworks manufactured because a numbered model is easier to package, and consulting brochures presented as thought leadership. Research used as decoration belongs there too. A long reference list cannot rescue a weak argument, just as personal experience cannot substitute for evidence where evidence is required.
The standard that remains is more demanding. A serious reader should leave an article understanding an important business question differently from when they began it. Sometimes that takes research, sometimes experience, and almost always judgement.
What a decision sets in motion
The more senior the role, the fewer important decisions can be reduced to a choice between an obviously good option and an obviously bad one. The difficult choices sit between legitimate competing interests: speed and confidence, efficiency and resilience, growth and control, innovation and reliability, delegation and accountability, immediate performance and future capability.
An idea can be strategically fashionable, financially attractive and operationally plausible, and still produce consequences an organisation later regrets. For senior leaders, the decisive question is therefore seldom whether an idea sounds convincing in the room where it is proposed. It is whether the organisation understands what the decision will set in motion, and whether it is prepared to live with the consequences.
That is the territory Qalbur exists to examine.