Work With Me
Some companies need to optimise what they are. Others need to become something else. The hardest — and most consequential — work is telling the difference, and having the courage and the capacity to make the change.
For three decades, across executive search and advisory, my work has been to find and guide the leaders who can carry a company through exactly that passage.
What are you thinking?
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 is. 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. Drawing on a career in retained executive search in the region, including eight years leading a Shanghai practice.
How I work. There's no standard template — only a bespoke one, built new each time. Every enterprise is at a different point in its life, so the first task is always to read which moment this is, then build the method it calls for. The thinking beneath this work 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.