WHO I AM
Coach to Leaders · Strategy Consultant to Consultants
My clients come to me because I help them find their own answers, more quickly and clearly than they could alone. They do not come to me for my answers.
That requires someone who can engage seriously with the substance of what you are working on, hold the complexity without rushing to resolve it, and stay genuinely present throughout. It also requires someone who has been around enough, in enough different contexts, to know that the most useful perspective is rarely the most obvious one.
I have chosen breadth deliberately. My career has taken me from strategy consulting at the highest level to founding organisations from scratch, from teaching the tools of top-tier consulting to some of the world's most demanding audiences to spending years immersed in cultures and practices very different from the ones I grew up in. Each of those choices gave me fresh perspectives I can share with you.
The result is someone who is equally comfortable with a difficult analysis and a difficult conversation, with a governance crisis and a question about purpose, with the abstract and the immediately practical. I hold my expertise lightly, because in a coaching conversation the most important thing is rarely what I know, it is what you are able to work out for yourself.
How I came to be like this
I spent four years at McKinsey and Accenture learning what rigorous strategic thinking actually looks like in practice. I joined McKinsey as an experienced hire from a non-traditional background, which gave me an early understanding of what it means to succeed in an environment where the path is not straightforward.
I then left to build something. As a Founding COO at Teach First, I discovered what consulting alone cannot teach, the weight of real accountability, the experience of building from nothing, and the kind of thinking that is required when you cannot hand the problem back. Teach First has since supported over one million young people from low-income communities. That still matters to me.
Eight years at Ashridge Business School (now Hult Ashridge Executive Education) and ten years at Talik & Company (which spun out of Ashridge’s Sustainability Practice) gave me the formal grounding in coaching, teaching, and organisation consulting that now sits at the heart of my practice. After coaching and teaching over 3 000 executives, civil servants, and consultants across four continents, I find that my clients tend to have similar concerns but each experiences them in their own unique way.
Credentials at a glance
CONSULTING
Engagement Manager — McKinsey & Company
Project Consultant — Accenture
Director — Talik & Company
FOUNDING CXO
Founding COO — Teach First
Founding CTO — GuideStar UK
TEACHING
Strategy Tutor — Hult Ashridge Executive Education
Pedagogy & Organisational Impact Companion — School of International Futures
Visiting Strategy Professor — RANEPA
COACHING
Independent Executive Coach — Private, Public, and Third sectors
Start-up Coach — Climate tech, wellbeing and more
Case Interview and Career ‘Supercoach’ — IGotAnOffer.com
Please get in touch with any questions or to arrange an exploratory call
Not sure what you want to work on? That can be just as good a place to start as already knowing where you want to focus. I look forward to hearing from you.