About
One purpose. Realising potential.
For more than twenty years I have had one purpose: helping organisations, and the people in them, become everything they are capable of. It took hold at IMD, in the MBA and then directing executive development, and became a daily habit at Nike, a company built on serving every athlete* and telling you to find your greatness.
I have carried it through BlackRock, Nike, Shell and Sanofi, four industries and four countries, living in Switzerland, France and the United States as well as my native UK, always working the same way: a practitioner who stays through delivery, a curious student of how organisations really work, a collaborator who builds with the people already there, and a storyteller who helps people embrace change.
More recently I have learned AI by building with it, taking an AI tutoring product from strategy to shipped platform. It was always, first and foremost, about the learning. How I built it
My mission now is to help organisations build a workforce ready for the age of AI and humans working together. AI will change how almost all work gets done. The more it can do, the more people will be accountable for what remains uniquely human: leadership, collaboration, purpose, ethics, judgement, storytelling and followership.
That is the work I love.
*If you have a body, you are an athlete. Bill Bowerman. ‘Find your greatness’ was Nike’s line in 2012.
Where the purpose has taken me
Twenty years inside large, complex organisations
2021 to 2024
Sanofi
Group Head of Organisational Capability and Transformation. A 90,000-person enterprise with a new strategy and an organisation that had grown too many layers to deliver it.
What I did, and what stayed
- I built the function from scratch, 300-plus people across people analytics, organisation consulting, the transformation office, enterprise learning, skills and workforce planning, reporting to the Chief People Officer.
- I created Space to Lead, the enterprise programme that treated spans, layers, leadership and culture as one system, and led the CEO-sponsored simplification work alongside it.
- I was people and culture lead for Sanofi’s AI adoption, and co-led the Digital and AI programme for the top 150 with HEC Paris and OAO.
- What stayed: the Golden Rules written into every later reorganisation, a function run by the leaders I appointed, and a skills-first approach the World Economic Forum recognised as a Lighthouse.
2019 to 2021
Shell
VP Organisation Development and Learning for Downstream, then Integrated Gas and New Energies. A pandemic, negative oil prices, and a business of tens of thousands that had to be redesigned while it kept running.
What I did, and what stayed
- I led Reshape for the Downstream business: a 300-plus cross-functional programme team, five redesigned global businesses, one go-live date, and roughly a billion dollars of structural cost out.
- The organisation itself changed: fewer executive roles, wider spans of control, materially fewer layers and faster decisions.
- What stayed: an operating model handed to the line, a deliberately decommissioned programme, and an honest lessons-learnt review the leadership team commissioned and shared.
2010 to 2019
Nike
Nine years, five roles: Chief Learning Officer, HR for the brand functions, strategy and HR for the Jordan brand, HR for Nike Digital, then VP HR for Asia Pacific and Latin America.
What I did, and what stayed
- As the company’s first Chief Learning Officer I created NikeU, its first corporate university, serving more than 55,000 people worldwide.
- For the Jordan brand I combined strategy and HR leadership and led a five-year growth plan presented to Michael Jordan.
- For Nike Digital I led the people side of turning a coalition of digital teams into one organisation, partnering the company’s first Chief Digital Officer.
- What stayed: NikeU, still the subject of an IMD case study a decade on; a digital organisation that outlived the people who built it; and a people strategy for a 9,000-person geography I sat on the leadership team of.
2006 to 2010
Barclays Global Investors and BlackRock
Global talent-management and innovation leadership in San Francisco, through the merger that created the world’s largest asset manager.
What I did, and what stayed
- I led employee development and the integrated talent processes, board-sponsored succession design among them, with a global team of fifteen.
- Through BlackRock’s acquisition of BGI I led the people side of integration.
- I created the iShares Innovation Office and designed the competency model the talent processes ran on.
Early career
Consulting and IMD
Senior consultant in business architecture, operating-model design and strategy execution, then Director of Custom Programmes at IMD.
Where the twenty years began
- The consulting work was in telecommunications, logistics and retail.
- At IMD in 2005 and 2006 I directed custom executive programmes for global companies, working with faculty on their design and delivery.
- The Financial Times ranked IMD’s custom programmes first in the world in 2025 and in the global top three for three years running.
And since late 2024, building with AI
2024 to present
TalentOptima
Founder of TalentOptima: capability and transformation advisory, the diagnostics I build myself, and an AI product built end to end.
The practice, and why I built a product
- TalentOptima is my own practice: capability and transformation advisory for complex organisations, with the applied AI engineering to support it.
- Building the product has sharpened my understanding of what AI makes possible, and clarified where I want to apply it next: leading transformation inside a global organisation.
What I believe
Most of what you need is already inside.
Learned in the doing, and none of them complicated.
About organisations
If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.often called an African proverb; origin uncertain
People buy into a solution when they can see their own fingerprints on it, so I work with your leaders and teams, not around them.
If you have a body, you are an athlete.Bill Bowerman
Everyone has a contribution. A leader’s job is to make each person’s superpower visible, and valued by the whole team.
The best is the enemy of the good.Voltaire
Put the effort where the value is created, ship the thing that matters and works, and improve it in the open as you learn.
There is no finish line.Nike, 1977
Learning agility is the edge: the best organisations get better at getting better, and keep raising the bar.
What I bring
Practitioner, not adviser.
I have carried the consequences of my own decisions and learned what they mean in the real world. I work as part of the leadership team and see the job through: no passing the baton.
Built to run without me.
I believe in building capability that lasts. I aim to leave leaders equipped, knowledge transferred, rhythms established and measures owned by your team.
The power of &, by design.
Capability and AI fluency. Speed and inclusion. Outside perspective and inside ownership. AI recommendation and human judgement. The strongest approaches multiply what each side of the coin brings.