Patch Aure's Blog: notes on management, business and society, and indigenous Filipino management

What do you want to read?

Pick a stream to browse the whole thing, or hit surprise me for one essay at random.

or browse everything

Featured Bullshit and verisimilitude

Neither tool nor companion

The model is not a tool and not a shared self. It is a companion in the work that has no interior life, and its emptiness is what forces me to do the caring.

June 27, 2025 6 min read

Read this essay →

What I am reflecting on

All six →

Six synthesis essays, one for each stream of this blog: where my thinking stands right now, and where it is still unsettled.

  • Pamamahalang Pilipino

    What I mean by Pamamahalang Pilipino

    A map across the Pamamahalang Pilipino essays. The name carries the argument, every Filipino value is dual-use, and scale and structure, not exhortation, decide which face shows.

    Jun 30, 2026 7 min
  • AI and learning

    Generative AI in the management classroom, so far

    A synthesis across the AI-and-teaching essays. AI removes the friction of reading, verifying, and prompting, and that friction was doing the teaching, so the work becomes deciding which frictions to protect.

    Jun 30, 2026 7 min
  • Business and society

    Business as a force for good, taken structurally

    A map across the business-and-society essays. Profit is a byproduct, more-than-profit concedes too much, and whether a business does good is read in its configuration, not its declarations.

    Jun 30, 2026 7 min
  • Daily Gospel Insights

    Reading the Gospel through the work of managing

    A synthesis of the Daily Gospel Insights. Reading each day’s Gospel as a seed for one management insight, and the conviction underneath: that organizations exist for the flourishing of persons.

    Jun 30, 2026 6 min
  • Critical realism

    The machinery under everything: authenticity, insight, morphogenesis

    The theoretical spine. Lonergan supplies insight and authenticity, Archer the morphogenetic mechanism, Bhaskar the stratified depth, and together they keep mechanism and direction apart.

    Jun 30, 2026 7 min
  • Bullshit and verisimilitude

    Bullshit and verisimilitude: the map I have been drawing

    A synthesis of the bullshit-and-verisimilitude essays. The series moves honesty from the true-or-false surface to the disposition underneath, where the line may be real yet hard to verify.

    Jun 30, 2026 7 min

About this blog

Recommended

  • Bullshit and verisimilitude

    Which stage were you standing on

    A hypothetical: a motivational speaker fabricates his rock-bottom story and, when checked, reaches for a storyteller’s license after years of being received as a business mentor. The field you are received in, not the label you claim, sets the standard you answer to.

    Jul 4, 2026 5 min
  • Bullshit and verisimilitude

    The hearing is the argument

    A hypothetical hearing: the chair’s words are careful and many-caused, and the event still performs a single accusation. That gap is why I started reading what a message says and what its form does as two different things.

    Jul 3, 2026 5 min
  • Matthew 13:44-52

    The responsibility of those who have understood

    When we truly understand something meaningful, we are obligated to manifest that insight through our character and actions. Authentic understanding is not a private intellectual achievement but a gift to be shared in service of truth.

    Jul 30, 2023 1 min
  • Matthew 13:1-9

    Do we make our soils fertile?

    Dr. Aure uses the parable of the sower to challenge passive waiting: opportunities and blessings are plentiful, but only those who cultivate capability, take risks, and respond to invitations can receive them. Personal agency is the indispensable condition for flourishing.

    Jul 21, 2022 1 min
  • Bullshit and verisimilitude

    A myth you are allowed to question

    The pro-myth argument is right that public order needs narrative. It does not follow that bullshit is allowed. The dividing line is whether the story can be revised.

    Jul 1, 2025 6 min
  • John 3:7

    How can we know more about heaven?

    Drawing on Aquinas and Lonergan, Dr. Aure proposes that knowledge of heaven is retroduced through beautifully complex systems that point to an Intelligent Designer. He challenges managers and entrepreneurs to see their organizations as potential foretastes of heaven, virtuous cycles of human flouri

    Apr 26, 2022 2 min

Latest

Browse all →
  • Bullshit and verisimilitude

    Everyone in the room cared

    A hypothetical: the statement is accurate, grieving, and still functions as bullshit. The reason looks structural, a communications chain built to limit liability that subordinates the truth no matter how much the people in it care.

    Jul 2, 2026 6 min
  • Pamamahalang Pilipino

    How a business actually changes the world

    Asking how a business changes the world is asking about its innovation. Innovation recombines existing capacities into a whole with new properties, and which way that recombination points is a moral choice rather than a technical one.

    Jun 27, 2026 4 min
  • Pamamahalang Pilipino

    DKL as a framework, not a badge

    A worry about Diwa-Kapwa-Loob: if diwa is undone by being claimed, can it ground a management theory at all? It can, because naming a structure and claiming a personal virtue are different acts. The framework checks organizations; it does not certify people.

    Jun 25, 2026 4 min
  • Business and society

    Structure over declaration

    Purpose-washing is not caused by an organization being explicit about its values. It is caused by the gap between what the bylaws declare and what the configuration actually does. So audit the structure instead of trusting the proclamation.

    Jun 23, 2026 4 min
  • Pamamahalang Pilipino

    A value you can hang on a wall

    The difference between a value you declare and a virtue you practice, and the discipline that turns one into the other.

    Jun 22, 2026 3 min
  • Business and society

    What you lose when you say it

    Certain traits cannot survive being claimed. The moment a leader announces humility or servanthood, the announcement re-centers the self and produces the opposite of what it names.

    Jun 21, 2026 4 min
  • Pamamahalang Pilipino

    Working as designed, at the wrong scale

    Three familiar explanations for Philippine corruption, and why a scale mismatch explains more than any of them.

    Jun 20, 2026 3 min
  • Business and society

    When a magazine spread becomes a fence

    Awards from Geneva and a Vogue spread look like vanity until you watch them hold off the quarries. International attention becomes armour around a Philippine watershed, and I find that clever and uneasy at once.

    Jun 16, 2026 4 min
  • Pamamahalang Pilipino

    Disruption is timpla seen from the wrong side

    A claim that disruptive innovation is itself a form of blending: existing technology, a new market segment, and a different cost structure, recombined. The disruption label centers whoever got displaced, not the act of creation.

    Jun 15, 2026 4 min

The archive

Every essay and reflection, organized by year and month.

Search

Full-text search across 675 posts.