Forty years of being in the room when it mattered.

The work

Business first. The psychology came because business made it necessary.

MBA in 1984, and management positions ever since — eleven years with GE in international roles, then more than ten years in executive search as a founding member of IESF. It was during the search years that I went back to study: first an MSc in organisational psychology, then a clinical doctorate.

That order matters. I did not arrive at business from psychology; I went looking for psychology because four decades of sitting with boards and management teams kept raising questions that business training does not answer. How organisations actually work. How executives work with each other, and where they stop being able to.

What it teaches you is that strategy is rarely the problem. Companies usually know what they should do. What stops them is the conversation nobody is willing to have, the initiative sequenced in the wrong order, and the change that was announced but never carried.

Circularity is the current version of that problem. The technical answers increasingly exist — many of them written down in standards I helped draft. The difficulty is getting a leadership team to decide, and then to stay decided.

GO-TKM

Global Executive Vice-President, and vice-chair of the board

GO-TKM is a Brussels-based non-profit think-tank for tacit knowledge management — the study of what experienced people know but cannot easily write down, and how organisations lose it.

That is not an academic side interest. It is the intellectual basis of how these courses are taught: the facilitated hour exists because the most valuable knowledge in the room is usually already in the room, held by people who have not yet said it out loud.

GO-TKM endorses both Green Mentors courses, and is sponsored by Nordic Heads.