Speaking

I speak about why strategic investment in change doesn't last – and what to do about it.

For twenty-five years I've worked inside the evolution of the world's most loved brand, through near-bankruptcy and five subsequent step-changes in scale. The pattern is consistent across every transformation I've seen: 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 transformation is being asked to scale.

I've spoken at South by Southwest, 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

1. 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 transformation already running in your portfolio. For: board offsites, executive team sessions, transformation leadership conferences.
2. 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's built the infrastructure to support — and 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.
3. Your brand lost what it stood for - now what? Most transformation work is inside-out: fix the operating model, modernise the technology, develop the team. But the customer experiences something else entirely — 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 transformation 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 transformation pressure, CMO and brand leadership forums, board sessions on brand strategy.
4. 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 — agency restructurings, AI arriving, 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 organisations rebuilding their operating model.
5. Four moves of the Sensei leader. Three you've never been taught There are two questions about leadership. The first — can you lead people through change? — is what most leadership development addresses. The second is the one that determines whether your transformation was a moment or a capability: can you build something that works after you've gone? I've watched leaders do everything the books say — build trust, model vulnerability, develop their people — and still leave behind work that quietly unravelled within eighteen months. The talk names the four moves, why three of them are missing from almost every leadership programme, and what board-level credibility actually requires when your transformation is being judged by what survives you. For: leadership development programmes, executive offsites, succession planning conversations.

How I work

Keynotes (30-60 min), executive team sessions (90 min 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 organisation needs to build next.