Work With Me
I help at the point where a company must decide what it should become — and who should lead it there.
This takes two forms. One is counsel — for boards and owners weighing a change of form, and what it will ask of the people at the top. The other is the search for the leader built to carry that change through.
Both begin the same way: by reading, honestly, the moment a company is actually in, before prescribing anything. The difference is rarely obvious — and reading it correctly is where the work begins.
Transformation & renewal counsel. Counsel for boards, owners, and leadership teams facing a change of form — reading whether the moment calls for optimisation or genuine transformation, and what that demands of the people at the top. The work begins, always, with the question most diagnostics skip: is this still the right thing to be? And it reaches to the deeper one beneath any transformation — what the enterprise is, what it must let go of, and how to keep it capable of changing shape for as long as it lasts.
Leadership selection. The leader who can optimise what a company is and the leader who can transform it into something else are different creatures — and matching the right one to the moment is where the challenge lies. The work is to read which the situation truly calls for, then find the leader built for it: the disciplined operator who can sharpen and extend what already works, or the rarer figure who can carry a company through a genuine change of form. This draws on a career in retained executive search in the region, including eight years leading a Shanghai practice.
How I work. Every enterprise is at a different point in its life, so there is no standard template — the method is built for the case. The thinking beneath it is set out in full in my book, Could Lao Tzu Be the CEO? The work itself begins with a conversation.
If any of this speaks to a question you are sitting with, I would be glad to talk.