Leadership Spotlight

As part of our new leadership spotlight series, we’re sitting down with leaders across Council Advisors—including our colleagues at SSA & Company, The Miles Group, and High Lantern Group—to share insights on leadership, execution, and what it takes to drive results in today’s business environment.

 

You’ve worked with clients through other major business trends and disruptions over the years. How does AI compare?

AI represents a fundamentally different category of disruption. Unlike previous technology waves that required significant capital or technical infrastructure, AI democratizes capability. Any organization can access frontier models today. This creates a unique compression of competitive advantage: early adopters won’t just gain efficiency, they’ll redefine what’s possible in their industries before others establish best practices.

We’re seeing two distinct strategic approaches emerge. Some organizations are pursuing portfolio strategies, running hundreds or thousands of pilots to discover value through experimentation. Others are making concentrated bets on three to five mission-critical use cases with full executive commitment. The companies that win won’t necessarily be those who chose the “right” strategy, but those who can convert experimentation into institutional capability fastest.

The real strategic challenge isn’t technological—it’s organizational. AI’s effectiveness in narrow applications is well-established, but the transformation economics only unlock at scale. This requires three non-negotiable elements: disciplined change management to drive adoption, data infrastructure that’s actually fit for purpose, and leadership willing to fundamentally redesign work rather than simply automate existing processes.

The companies treating this as an IT project will generate pilots. The ones treating it as a business model evolution will generate returns. The window to establish that discipline is narrower than most executives assume.

What principle or lesson from earlier in your career still guides your work now?

The most durable principle I’ve learned is that transformation scales through trust architecture, not methodology. Relationships build trust. Trust enables adoption. Adoption creates scale. This isn’t soft skill philosophy; it’s the critical path for any change agenda.

When clients genuinely trust you, they’ll move through uncertainty with you rather than retreating to what’s comfortable. That trust isn’t built in executive presentations—it’s built shoulder to shoulder, solving real problems with people at every level of the organization. From the front line, where work actually happens, to the executive team where resources get allocated, transformation requires aligned conviction across the entire system.

 

The strategic implication is counterintuitive: invest in relationships before you need them. I’ve made it a practice to build connections early, add value without transactional expectations, and stay present even when there’s no active engagement. This creates a network of institutional memory and goodwill that becomes invaluable when the stakes are high.

 

The compounding effect is remarkable. People you helped as mid-level managers eventually lead divisions. Operators you partnered with become executives sponsoring major initiatives. These relationships don’t just open doors—they change the quality of what’s possible because you’ve already established credibility where it matters most.

 

In an era where everyone is selling transformation, trusted relationships are the only sustainable differentiator. They determine whether your recommendations get implemented or filed away.

 

What advice would you give leaders navigating transformation today?

Strategy is a forcing function for courage. The leaders who succeed in transformation don’t hedge. They make clear, defensible choices and then protect those choices from organizational entropy.

A mentor once told me: You can have five strategies, four of them would likely be successful, but you need to execute only one. That insight shapes how I advise leaders today. Declare your thesis. Make the tradeoffs explicit. Then become relentless about execution against that singular path. Transformations rarely fail because of the strategy; they fail in the wobble. When doubt creeps in, when pressure mounts, when early results disappoint, weak commitment becomes the liability that kills momentum.

The tactical expression of this principle is precision in accountability. The most successful programs I’ve seen don’t run on inspirational one-pagers—they run on detailed charters by workstream that make expectations, ownership, and metrics unmistakable. Ambiguity is the enemy of execution. If your team can’t articulate exactly what success looks like in their domain, you don’t have alignment; you have theater.

What separates leaders who deliver from those who announce is sustained operational discipline. Clarity of strategic intent. Clarity of structural accountability. Clarity of progress measures. And the institutional resolve to maintain that clarity when complexity fights back. Transformation is ultimately a test of whether leadership can sustain conviction longer than the organization can sustain resistance.

Success depends less on having a perfect strategy and more on executing with conviction so the organization sees the change as inevitable.

During your career, what has changed most with how companies approach operational excellence, and how does that shape your work today with our colleagues at SSA & Company?

The fundamental shift is from building capability as infrastructure to deploying capability as a competitive weapon.

In the Six Sigma era, operational excellence was treated as organizational transformation. Companies allocated 2-3% of headcount to full-time improvement roles, invested heavily in cultural change, and embedded new decision-making frameworks across the enterprise. The model was: build the machine, then let it run. That approach created enduring capability, but it was capital-intensive, time-intensive, and often disconnected from business urgency.

Today, most organizations already have latent operational capability distributed throughout the business. The strategic challenge has evolved from capability-building to capability activation. The question isn’t whether your people can drive improvement—it’s whether they’re organized, resourced, and incentivized to do so against the right priorities.

This changes everything about how we work with clients at SSA & Company. We don’t extract talent into training programs—we embed expertise directly into live business problems through apprenticeship models that accelerate both learning and impact. We’re ruthlessly selective about where to focus, explicitly targeting the areas where modest investment yields disproportionate returns. And we move with velocity, building replicable playbooks in one area and rapidly cascading them to the next priority before momentum dissipates.

AI and advanced analytics have compressed cycle times even further. We can now iterate on process redesign, test interventions, and scale solutions at speeds that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. This creates a new imperative: operational excellence is no longer a multi-year cultural journey—it’s a sequenced series of high-impact sprints where speed to value determines whether the organization sustains commitment.

The companies that win aren’t building better improvement systems. They’re weaponizing the capability they already have against their most critical business constraints, faster than their competitors can react.