WORK WITH TOM

Hitting your numbers and reaching your ceiling are not the same thing. I work with boards, executives and founders to find where that ceiling sits, across leadership, strategy and technology, in advisory work as well as keynotes and board sessions.

performance stalls when leadership, strategy and technology stop evolving together.

The landscape does not wait, and leadership, strategy and technology each have to keep evolving with it. What makes that hard is that they rarely move at the same rate. Technology has run ahead, while strategy and leadership are often still calibrated to a market that no longer behaves the way it once did.

The result is rarely a visible failure. It is an organization that works, hits most of its numbers and still produces well below what it is capable of. Depth in one variable does not compensate for misalignment with the others. A good strategy the organization cannot carry out still eats the budget and the year. So do technology initiatives the strategy never called for.

Outside help often makes this harder rather than easier. Advisors tend to arrive deep in one of these and treat the rest as context. Most of what they bring was settled before your conditions moved. And most have only ever seen an organization from one position, which shows up in what they think the problem is. Depth in each, a read that is current and time spent in the job you are doing: advice worth taking has all three.

Where I Can Help

Board members, executives and founders each see a different slice of the same organization, and each carries a different kind of exposure when the read is wrong. How I work with you depends on which seat you are in.

Board Members

I have sat where you sit, as a member and then as chair. The hardest part of that seat is judging whether an organization is performing to what it is capable of when you are not the one running it.

Executives

Problems tend to arrive already labelled. Growth is a sales problem, delivery is an operations problem, and the label is frequently wrong. Decades spent in leadership, in strategy and in technology mean I can follow a problem wherever it actually lives, rather than steering it toward the ground I know best. The question underneath is always the same one. What is this organization capable of producing that it currently is not?

Founders

You do not have the buffer a large organization provides, and a wrong read lands on you directly. I have built ventures, sold them and lived with the consequences of my own calls. The work is closing the distance between what the business is producing and what it is capable of.

Tom has the unique ability to cut through layers of complexity and provide simple, clear and practical recommendations.

Murray L.,

CEO, Leading Professional Services Organization