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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