Speaking

I speak about why reinvention doesn't hold, and what to do about it.

For twenty-five years I was on the hook for change inside one of the world's most loved brands, through near-bankruptcy and five step-changes in scale. Seven roles, six functions built from nothing. The pattern held every time: most investment produces temporary improvement, not lasting capability. The strategy was right. The architecture was wrong.

My talks are for senior leadership teams holding three pressures at once: preserving the brand and capability that already work, modernising the function to meet what's coming and proving the result to the board without breaking the company in the process. The pressure is sharpest in marketing right now, but the pattern is the same wherever reinvention is being asked to scale.

I've spoken at South by Southwest (SXSW), multiple Fortune 500 leadership offsites and conferences including Wavelength. I've co-taught the Corporate Strategy module of the TRIUM Executive MBA with Professor Sonia Marciano of NYU Stern, and co-teach the MBA module at HEC Paris.

What I speak about

• Your transformation worked. Two years later, it's gone. Most senior leaders have approved transformation budgets that produced two years of visible progress and then quietly disappeared. The money was real. The return wasn't. There's a structural reason this keeps happening, a board-level test that surfaces it before the budget is committed and a different way to read every programme already running in your portfolio. For: board offsites, executive team sessions, transformation leadership conferences.
• AI will make your team faster. It might also make them worse. Ask any senior leader what their team will do with the time AI frees up and the answer is always "more strategic work." That's not what happens. There's a gap opening between the intelligence work AI is about to automate and the judgement work nobody has built the infrastructure to support. Most senior leaders haven't named it yet. The talk shows where the gap is, why it widens silently and what to build before your team becomes efficient and directionless at the same time. Most visible right now in marketing functions, but the pattern is reaching every function fast. For: executive teams making AI adoption decisions, marketing leadership forums, AI strategy events.
• Your brand lost what it stood for. Now what? Most reinvention work is inside-out: fix the operating model, modernise the technology, develop the team. But the customer experiences something else entirely, which is drift. The brand still works. The numbers still hold. But something underneath has gone, and the team that watched it go doesn't quite know how to get it back. The talk surfaces the outside-in question that reinvention rarely asks, the specific kind of loss that happens when companies modernise faster than their brand can keep up and what it takes to rebuild what the brand stood for without rolling back what's been gained. For: executive offsites for legacy brands under reinvention pressure, CMO and brand leadership forums, board sessions on brand strategy.
• Your team is scaling, but your strategy isn't. What to fix first. Tactics-first execution. The brand-versus-performance trade-off. The tool trap. Rented expertise. Each more sophisticated than the last. None of them scale. The pattern is most visible in marketing right now, with agency restructurings, AI arriving and old models collapsing, but the same trap shows up wherever a function is being asked to deliver at scale. The talk names the four traps, the single flaw they share and the very different shape of what actually scales. There is another way. Most leadership teams haven't seen it because it doesn't look like the thing they're being sold. For: senior leadership offsites, CMO forums, large companies rebuilding their operating model.
• Your best people are the bottleneck. Nobody will say it. Somewhere in the last few years the decisions that used to take a day started taking six weeks. Nobody decided this. It arrived one safeguard at a time, each one sensible on its own, and now the people you trust most are the constraint on everything they touch. The talk shows where the layers actually came from, why hiring better people makes it worse rather than better, and what has to change in how a company decides before anything downstream gets faster. For: executive teams, board offsites, companies whose growth has outrun the way they decide.
• You did everything the leadership books said. It unravelled anyway. There are two questions about leadership. The first, can you lead people through change?, is what most leadership development answers. The second decides whether your reinvention was a moment or a capability: can you build something that works after you have gone? I have watched leaders do everything the books say. Build trust, model vulnerability, develop their people. And still leave behind work that quietly came apart within eighteen months. The talk names the four moves that decide it, why three of them are missing from almost every leadership programme and what board-level credibility actually asks of you when your work is judged by what survives you. For: leadership development programmes, executive offsites, succession planning conversations.

How I work

Keynotes (30 to 60 minutes), executive team sessions (90 minutes to half a day) and panel moderation. The talks above are starting points. Most engagements involve shaping the argument around what the audience is actually wrestling with. I work best with senior audiences ready to do the harder thinking about what their company needs to build next.