You would think that after this long in business I’d be able to tell you what I do. Truth is from a conventional marketer’s perspective I’m a hopeless disgrace. I can say though that I like what I do and people keep asking me to do it, whatever ‘it’ is.

It has been a dozen or so years since I took the big risk. With no assured income, not even a pipeline of possible work, four young kids, a mortgage, a partner  who was full time parenting (the gorgeous and increasingly beautiful Maria), I hung up a shingle and started offering leadership coaching and team building workshops. It scares me more now when I think about it than it did back then. Some great people opened opportunities for me; Tim Dixon encouraged me to get my first professional accreditation and Paul Steele in particular taught me a lot of what I learned in those early days. Over the years there have been many people who I owe deep gratitude, and over the last five years, Derek Winter my business partner has been top of the list.

I’m extremely privileged. Maybe I just land on my feet, but some of the clients I’ve worked with I’d rate as among the best people I’ve known. And one of the reasons I love my job so much, is that I work with organisations who’s stuff matters. Because work for me has always been a way to make the world better, I find myself drawn to leaders and organisations who don’t just go to work to make a buck, they believe in something.

So there’s a few dimensions to what I do, even if they don’t bundle together neatly. In essence, I design and facilitate change processes. But for me, it’s not an academic exercise, it is deeply relational. It’s about helping people get unstuck, and it’s about, in Jim Collins’ now famous words, ‘moving from good to great’.

Strategy is part of it. Being a sounding board for leaders is part of it. I seem to be able to get people together to work on a shared problem, even when their points of view vary greatly. I find myself reminding people that on the one hand work is not that important in the scheme of things, and on the other it makes or breaks us.

There’s a bit of a bio and some nice things that people have said about my work here.