Speaking

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

Seven roles. Six functions built from nothing. Twenty-five years inside one of the world's most loved brands, through near-bankruptcy and five step-changes in scale. That is six goes at the same problem in six different parts of a business, which is what makes it a pattern rather than a story. It 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 but 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. A gap is opening between the intelligence work AI is about to automate and the judgement work nobody has built the infrastructure to support. It widens quietly, and most senior leaders haven't named it yet. This talk is about what to build before your team becomes efficient and directionless at the same time.. 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. Something underneath has gone, and the team that watched it go doesn't quite know how to get it back. Reinvention always asks what the company should become. It almost never asks what the customer would miss. This talk is about the second question, and about getting back what was lost without giving up what was 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, and each one bought in good faith. They share a single flaw, and the thing that does scale looks nothing like any of them. Most leadership teams haven't seen it, because it doesn't look like what 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. This talk is about where those layers came from and what has to change in how a company decides before anything downstream gets faster. The part that catches every room: hiring better people makes it worse, not better. 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. Four moves decide it, and three of them are missing from almost every leadership programme. What survives you is what you end up being judged on, and almost nobody is taught to build for that. 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.