Executive advisory · Boards · Keynotes
By the time it reaches you, it is no longer true.
I help chief executives and boards find out why a good strategy has stopped turning into action. Usually the plan is sound. What the top of the business is being told is not.
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HarareJohannesburgWorking internationally
01 / The real problem
Execution rarely breaks where you see it break.
By the time a problem shows up in the numbers, the cause is usually two or three decisions upstream. That is where I start.
Decisions dissolve
The room agrees. Outside the room, ownership blurs and the decision quietly stops moving. Nothing was refused. It just did not happen.
Alignment is assumed
People leave the same meeting with different versions of what was decided and who does what next. The gap only shows up a quarter later.
Symptoms get treated
More reporting, another workshop, a new framework. The cause is untouched, so the problem comes back wearing different clothes.
If two of those describe your last two quarters, the call is worth 30 minutes.
Book a diagnostic call 30 minutes · No fee02 / Why it happens
Honesty gets more expensive the higher it travels.
Telling you a problem early and in full costs a manager more than softening it. Across five layers, that softening adds up in one direction.
The faint bar behind each row is what the floor knows. The solid bar is what survives the trip upstairs. Each level drops the part that is expensive to carry.
What lands on your desk is tidy, current and wrong in the places that decide.
The judgement was sound. The picture was not.
03 / What actually decides
Your business runs on two structures at once.
One is written down and on the wall. The other is where the decisions really get made. My job is to read the second one.
The chart
The room
One is reported. The other decides.
04 / Is this you
Six situations worth 30 minutes.
- Your team agrees in the room, then funds something else.
- You have made the same structural change twice and the tension came back.
- A decision is close to sign-off and something about it is bothering you.
- The person being blamed is doing exactly what their incentives reward.
- You are about to restructure, sell or automate based on what you have been told.
- You are new in the seat, and the business is your only source on itself.
If none of these describes your week, we have nothing to discuss yet, and I would rather say so now.
Every report on your desk passed through someone with something to lose.
05 / How this starts
One way in. Four steps.
Everything starts with the same 30-minute call. Each step below is a link: click the one you want and it takes you straight there. You do not have to do all four.
Alignment check
Ten questions, on your own, on screen. Ends with a drawing of where your gaps line up.
Take the check Step 02 · 30 minutesA call with me
About you and the decision in front of you. Ends with a recommendation, not a proposal.
You are here Book the 30 minutes Step 03 · 90 minutesPreliminary report
About your business, with whoever would sponsor the work. Ends with a written position.
Book the 90 minutes Step 04 · 12–16 weeksThe investigation
The full inquiry and the intervention that closes it. From US$35,000.
How it runs06 / Ways to work together
Five ways forward.
What comes after the call depends on what the call finds. You are not committing to any of these by booking one.
Executive advisory
Standing access, so you have somebody outside the business to test a decision against before you take it.
Most often a chief executive, a chair or a managing director, because they are the ones with no peer inside the company. It also works for any executive who owns a decision the rest of the building has a stake in: a finance director facing a capital call, a chief operating officer carrying a turnaround. What matters is the position, not the title.
Held to a small number of relationships at a time, because the value is being available when it matters.
Leadership team alignment
One problem, repaired. A decision that keeps being reopened, two functions working to different versions of the same plan, or a piece of execution that has stalled twice.
The scope, the fee and the finish date are agreed before it starts, and it stops on that date. It does not turn into a standing arrangement, and it does not quietly grow.
Keynotes and facilitation
Practical talks that help a room see and name the pattern it is living in, plus panels and facilitated sessions. Full brief for organisers on the speaking page.
Board advisory
Work with a board that has fallen into conflict. Either the board is divided within itself, or the board and the management team have stopped agreeing about what is actually happening in the business. The chair or a board member usually makes the call.
Bounded the same way as the work above. A scope, a fee and an end date agreed before it starts, and a written position at the end that both sides read. It is not mediation: the question is where the two accounts of the business separate, not who is right.
Usually before a contested decision, ahead of a refinancing or a transaction, or where the same item has come back to the board three times.
FranklySpeaking
Where full investigations are run. 12–16 weeks, ending in a written finding. Separate firm, separate terms.
07 / The thinking
Three things I write and speak about.
The Filter
Why the version of your business that reaches you is not the version your people are living, and the three ways to hear the real one.
First Generation Leaders
If you are the first in your family to run something this size, you have fewer people to check your thinking against. That changes what good advice looks like.
Precisely Wrong
AI does not argue with a bad brief. If your data already flatters you, automation just makes the flattery faster.
08 / About Frank
Execution rarely fails for lack of competence. It fails in the gaps between good decisions.
I advise chief executives, boards and executive teams on the conditions that stop a sound decision from becoming an executed one.
The method comes from aviation accident investigation. Work out what a capable team believed at the moment they acted, then find the conditions that made that belief reasonable. It is the same discipline, applied to a business.
I have held an operating role, served on a multinational board, and worked in governance in international member organisations. That last part matters more than it sounds. It is where I learned what a board is told and what it is not told, and how far those two accounts can drift apart with the whole room acting in good faith.
Where I have worked
- Telecommunications
- Energy
- Mining
- Logistics
- Infrastructure
- Construction
- Banking
- State-owned enterprises
The method transfers to
- Ports and terminals
- Rail and freight
- Water and sanitation
- Payments and mobile money
- Data centres and cloud
- Downstream fuel
The second list is where the method works, rather than where I have been. If you sit in one of them, 30 minutes is the fastest way to find out whether it applies.
Ask a business what is wrong and it will tell you what it has agreed to say is wrong.
09 / Start with the real question
Where is execution actually breaking down?
Bring the problem as you see it. We will use 30 focused minutes to work out what deserves a closer look.
No fee and no obligation. If I am the wrong person for the problem, I will say so on the call and tell you who is better placed.