“It was an absolute pleasure meeting you, and thank you so much for keynoting at our leadership event. Your clarity, insight and openness make you exceptionally easy to connect with, and inspiring to listen to."

Unsolicited feedback from Leadership Conference, N Ireland, 2025

Success in business increasingly comes down to what you are able to see before your competition does.

The pace and depth of change will never be this slow again.

Across most markets, categories and disciplines, that is simply the condition of business now. It creates extraordinary opportunity. It also creates real, sometimes existential, risk.

I have worked in strategy for more than thirty years, and studied and taught it at Oxford for much of the last decade. The contexts have changed beyond recognition. Yet one pattern has remained remarkably constant.

The businesses that succeed, and keep succeeding, are those that see better than others.

They notice what others miss. They challenge assumptions others have accepted as fixed, including their own. They recognise where value is moving before it becomes obvious. They keep revising their understanding of the world as it changes. And, in a small number of cases, they change that world themselves.

This capacity has become more important with the mass adoption of generative AI.

Information, analysis and the ability to test, model and prototype ideas are becoming dramatically more accessible. At the same time, these technologies are destabilising assumptions on which even long-established industries have been built.

As access to the same tools becomes widespread, advantage shifts elsewhere. It lies in the quality of the questions people ask, the assumptions they are willing to expose, and the possibilities they are able to recognise before others do.

The businesses that thrive will be those able to keep seeing what others cannot, then turn that insight into value others have not yet created.

My talks and workshops help leaders and organisations build that capability: to see technological change more clearly, surface and test the assumptions shaping their decisions, and develop strategies that remain useful when the world they were built for keeps moving.

How I can help

Whilst every engagement is different, my speaking work tends to be in one of two areas:

Leadership off-sites

Inspiring executive teams and boards to see strategy in a new and better way.

Company conferences

Highly immersive sessions that give the audience the skills to take their strategic thinking to another level.

Whilst every topic is tailored to the event, there are consistent themes that I explore:

Recent topics

In an age of AI, assumption brokering is an increasingly business critical leadership capability. This is an adaption of one of my Oxford sessions.

Leaders as Assumption Brokers

An exploration of why technology is only as disruptive as the thinking and beliefs that surround it and what to do about it.

The disruptive technology illusion

Advanced decision making and competitive advantage

How to think differently about decisions, drawing on psychology, philosophy and negotiation to help leaders make better decisions.