How I work
Look hard. Decide what matters. Do the work.
Owners, boards, and operators at the turn.
Most of the work comes from three places:
- Founders and owner-operators
- Running a company that’s grown past what one person can hold in their head, and deciding what to change, what to keep, and who to trust with it next. Often scaling across borders.
- Boards and investors
- Sponsors and directors, domestic and cross-border, who need a steady pair of hands on the inside to get a real read on the business, stabilize a situation, or shepherd a leadership change.
- Executives under pressure
- CEOs and senior leaders working through the hardest thirty, sixty, or ninety days of their tenure, whether that’s in New York, London, Singapore, or anywhere else the business is being decided.
Every engagement is its own thing.
But the shape usually looks like this.
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01
Get an honest read
A fast, careful look at what’s actually going on: the numbers, the operating rhythm, the people, the governance, what the market is telling you. Quantitative where it helps, conversations where it matters. No theater.
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02
Pick a short list of things that matter
A handful of priorities you can actually run. Who owns each one, what “good” looks like in 30, 60, 90 days, and how we’ll know if it’s working.
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03
Step in and help get it done
Depending on what you need: advisor to the CEO, executive in residence, interim COO, or someone running a specific piece of work. Close to the action, not above it.
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04
Leave it stronger than I found it
Install the reporting, the rhythms, and the people so that the next chapter doesn’t depend on me. A good engagement ends cleanly.
“Problems … require action, however uncomfortable that may be.”
A short shelf I keep coming back to.
Not a reading list for the sake of one. These are the books, essays, and institutions I genuinely learn from. The kind of material I’d hand a client or a younger operator and say, start here.
Leadership & judgment
- Peter Drucker on the executive The plainest writing I know about what the job actually is. Start with The Effective Executive and don’t be fooled by how easy it reads.
- Level 5 Leadership The best one-page description of the kind of leader who quietly turns a company around. Worth rereading once a year.
- What Makes an Effective Executive Drucker again. Eight practices, all boring, all true. If a leader is struggling, one of these is usually missing.
- The Fearless Organization Psychological safety treated as a serious operating input. Relevant any time a team is underperforming and nobody seems to be telling the truth.
Governance & the board
- NACD Directorship & Blue Ribbon reports The practitioner standard in the U.S. for what good board work looks like. I recommend the annual reports to directors who want to stay current.
- Corporate Governance Forum Daily working notes from the best governance lawyers and academics. I skim it the way others read the sports page.
- U.S. Board Index A yearly look at how boards are actually composed and run. Useful when a nominating committee is arguing about what “normal” looks like.
- The Error at the Heart of Corporate Leadership Bower & Paine on fiduciary duty and shareholder primacy. The cleanest challenge I’ve read to the assumptions most boards operate on.
Turnaround & interim ops
- Leading Corporate Turnaround The clearest field guide I’ve read. Diagnosis, stabilization, recovery, written by people who have actually done it.
- What Only the CEO Can Do A.G. Lafley on the jobs that don’t delegate. Short. Worth reading any time you’re stepping into a chief executive role, even temporarily.
- Transformation practice insights Set aside the consulting theater. The raw base rates on why turnarounds fail are genuinely useful. I cite them often.
- Why Transformation Efforts Fail Thirty years old and still right about ninety percent of what goes wrong. Eight failure modes, each one earned.
Strategy, M&A & capital
- Expectations Investing & capital allocation The best thinker I’ve found on the link between operating decisions and value. Everything he writes rewards slow reading.
- Valuation & corporate finance A career’s worth of tools, datasets, and essays, generously public. When I need a sanity check on a number, I start here.
- What Is Strategy? The one article I’d still hand a new CEO. Cuts through a lot of what passes for strategy and isn’t.
- M&A insights & annual reports Honest data on where deals create value and where they destroy it. A useful counterweight when a transaction is starting to feel inevitable.
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