About
I am an executive advisor. I work with founders, CEOs and leadership teams on the decisions and changes that shape their organisations, and on getting the strategy, the operation and the people lined up to deliver them.
Where this comes from
Most of my career has been in the delivery of major projects across geographies. Teams in different countries, working in different languages, on different systems, to different expectations, all delivering one thing.
A lot of it was joint venture work, and a joint venture is where this stops being theoretical. A JV has to build its own operating system from nothing. Its own processes, its own governance, its own way of deciding things. And that system still has to talk to each of the parent companies, who each have their own. There is no version of that which is only a strategy problem, or only a process problem, or only a people problem.
Later I moved into innovation, and built and led that capability for a region of more than a thousand people. That role ran on influence rather than through a reporting line, which means the work only happens if people choose it. So you spend your time designing the conditions where choosing it makes sense, and that means the strategy, the operation and the people have to line up at the same time.
The toolkit did not come from a methodology. It came from having to make this work where a single lens would have failed. And I got plenty of it wrong, which is most of how I learned it.
Three trainings, one system
Engineering taught me to solve problems, by breaking a system into its parts, finding where it fails and testing a hypothesis.
Strategy and design on bids and major projects taught me to design experiences, which starts with understanding what a client actually needs, including what they have not put into words.
Leading multidisciplinary teams across countries and contracting models taught me to lead change at scale.
For a long time I treated those as three separate skills. What I came to see is that the value is where they overlap, and that a change built on only one of them falls short. That idea started as a diagram of three circles in about 2019, and it has shaped all of my work since.
years in major projects, strategy and operations across Asia-Pacific
hours in the room with leaders and their teams
in the room, from one to one up to groups of fifty and more
Master of Engineering, UNSW
If you are about to start a change, or you are in the middle of one, I would be glad to hear where you are.
Get in touch