My career has been anything but linear. I left school to become a mountain guide, spent my twenties finding and losing a business, and have spent the twenty-five years since working across banking, technology, management consulting, energy, forestry, education and governance — on four continents.
At fifteen I talked my way out of finishing school to become a mountain guide — a pitch to my parents, tutor, housemaster and headmaster that I still count as one of the better strategic arguments I've made. I spent the next several years climbing and guiding across Nepal, New Zealand and Europe, gaining the resilience, adaptability and the comfort with uncertainty that still shapes how I lead today.
In my late twenties I set up an IT consultancy with a business partner I trusted completely — we'd trusted each other with our lives in the mountains, so I assumed the same trust would hold in business. It didn't. I was left with nothing but a £50,000 overdraft.
It took six years to climb out of that hole. The lesson wasn't really about money. It was about learning to ask for help, and about discovering that the strong, self-sufficient version of leadership I'd been performing wasn't leadership at all. The people around me solved the problem. I just had to let them.
Two people shaped what came next. Alan Dick, who gave me a partner role at Facilitators International and the confidence to speak up in the room. And Clare Hayward, who trusted me to lead the expansion of Academee into Asia Pacific — an experience that took the business from Singapore to Beijing and ended in a successful sale to Oliver Wyman.
From there: five months running mountain safety operations for a hundred-person team in Yemen. A forestry and sawmilling business I built and later sold, run on the belief that a happy team does the right thing without being told to. And then the Kraken Development Project — a $4 billion energy project that grew from ten people to over 350 across fifteen companies in three months.
On Kraken, my colleague Barry Fraser and I built the leadership team around four words: Trust, Transparency, Simplification and Change. That single lens delivered a 25% reduction in operating costs, an 18% saving on capital expenditure, and 535 consecutive days without a lost-time injury — in a high-risk, high-pressure environment spread across the world.
I've since distilled those four words, and everything else I've learned since, into a way of working I call 'the art and craft of getting it done.' It underpins every engagement I run today.
Not controlling every decision. Not having all the answers. Not being the smartest person in the room. Create clarity. Build trust. Hold people accountable. Develop capability. Adapt when the plan meets reality — because it always does.
Care first. Demand second. In that order.On being kind yet suitably demanding
Doing the right thing, particularly when it's difficult.
Having the conversations others avoid.
Following through on what matters.
Staying open to being wrong.
Responding well when the plan changes, because it will.
Every engagement draws on a different part of this experience. Let's talk about which parts are relevant to you.
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