Insights

And why the smartest organisations treat integration, not selection, as the real work. When a business hires a new CIO, CTO or digital leader, it tends to celebrate the wrong milestone. The offer is signed, the announcement goes out, and everyone quietly assumes the hard part is over. It isn't. The hard part is just beginning. The evidence is consistent on this point: an executive's early success depends far less on the quality of the hire and far more on how quickly that per

Sit in on a serious conversation among private equity operators right now and you'll hear a strikingly consistent confession. Hold periods have stretched, "12 is the new 5." A lot of 2021-vintage deals were bought at multiples that look, in hindsight, like a dumpster fire waiting to happen. Assets that can't be moved are piling up. And the reflex to blame interest rates is wearing thin, because the honest people in the room keep pointing somewhere less comfortable: at themsel

We're all familiar by now with the key stats on leadership derailment. Like the 40% figure quoted (I quote it regularly) to represent the huge number of leadership hires that don't work out. As a technology executive search professional, I wanted to dig into a more specific area of leadership derailment today and explore why technology leaders derail, and why the reasons they do are often very different to the reasons other leaders fail. Technology leaders rarely derail sudde

How to integrate as a new leader, matched to the stage the business is actually in Most advice for newly hired leaders assumes every arrival looks almost the same: learn the culture, build trust, find some early wins to build credibility, don't overreach. That advice is right, but it's also wildly incomplete. The stage a business is in reshapes what "good integration" even means. Walking into a pre-seed, bootstrapped startup burning through the founders' savings is a fundamen

New leaders, who fail, don't usually fail because they lack talent. They fail because the first months in a role are a period of acute exposure: old habits meet a new context, expectations go unspoken, and the support that would catch a stumble often isn't there yet. Executive-hiring research puts the failure rate for senior leaders at 30% to 50%, ending in firing or resignation within the first 18 months. That's a strikingly short runway for someone hired to lead. Failure lo

There is a generational reckoning underway in the mid-market, and it is playing out deal by deal, founder by founder. Baby Boomers who spent decades building businesses, and then spent even more decades refusing to sell them, are finally reaching their exit in numbers like never before. The result is a structural shift in M&A deal flow so large and so durable that most of the people positioned to profit from it are only beginning to understand exactly what they're dealing wit

A few days ago I published a piece on the Technology Operating Partner and the hiring challenges Australian PE firms are navigating. I wasn't expecting the response it generated. Within 48 hours I had over a dozen messages, mostly from senior consulting leaders asking some version of the same question: what about the AI Operating Partner? Is that a real role your seeing in the market right now? Is it different from the tech operating partner? And how should I position myself

I wanted to write this because I'm in an unusual position to speak to it. I spend a significant amount of time working with two groups who often don't know each other: exceptional technology leaders trying to break into private equity, and partners at PE firms struggling to work out exactly what DNA they're looking for in a technology operating partner or portco tech leader who can genuinely exploit the value that new technology can drive. And I'll note: I hesitate to single

My hot take on how the most technical role in the C-suite became the most complex leadership job in the organisation Last week I wrote about how the CIO role has changed over the years, and how many of the leaders currently sitting in that role haven't changed with it. The response to that piece made one thing clear: this isn't a CIO-specific story. It's happening, in a slightly different way across all technology roles in the C-Suite, but especially to the CTO role. The CIO

Over the past few months I've had a lot of career conversations with CIOs. Some sitting in role, some looking for their next move. ASX-listed businesses, mid-market companies, a few in the middle of significant transformation programmes. Different industries, different tenure, different pressures. But a handful of core themes kept coming up, and I thought it might be useful to shine a light on some of these - especially as the CIO role continues to evolve beyond that of 'just

This is a bit of a personal one. I was at my eight-year-old daughter's school assembly today. She was sitting cross-legged, hair slightly chaotic, wearing the same squinted expression she pulls when she's trying very hard not to laugh (I may have stuck my tongue out when she spotted me). I looked around at the other faces, forty kids in their little uniforms, fidgeting, waving at parents, mouthing along to their school song, which is set to the tune of a piece of French class

Almost every CAIO brief I've taken has looked significantly different from the last. The market still doesn't seem to know what it wants from its most senior AI executive. The CAIO is the newest C-Suite technology related role in the top-team, and its a hot topic. Not really a surprise, AI is changing the face of business (and everything else, for that matter). And much like AI, I'm finding that many hiring managers seem not to know exactly what they want this new executive t

Why the Chief People Officer just became one of the hardest jobs in the C-suite A short list, but not a complete list, of things the head of HR at a large company is now expected to have a credible opinion on: which jobs in the organisation will still exist in 2030; how much surveillance is acceptable in their productivity software; what to do when an AI hiring tool stops shortlisting diversity in engineering roles; whether the manager development program they spent four mill

This piece is an extension of last week's article on what I'm seeing across executive search in 2026. Some excellent conversations with clients, board members, and candidates over the past week have continued to expand my thinking, and I wanted to build on the "what I've seen so far this year" narrative and push it forward into where I think the market is heading over the next 18 months. Executive search is not what it was five years ago. The combination of AI-assisted candid

We're roughly a third of the way into 2026, and honestly, the conversations I've been having with business leaders this year feel different. Boards are more open. Leadership teams are more candid. I can't remember a stretch where I've had this many genuinely honest discussions about what's actually going on inside organisations. The uncertainty that emerged during the pandemic never really left. It just became harder to see. Leaders aren’t reacting anymore. They’re choosing,

What a book written in 1999 taught me about leadership in 2026 I always try to read at least one book cover-to-cover when I go away on vacation. On a recent 10 day trip to Vietnam I grabbed myself a copy of Frederic Hudson's The Adult Years: Mastering the Art of Self-Renewal. Written back in 1999, it certainly isn't new. It's definitely not trendy, and beyond this, I typically hate self-help books. To be honest, I only read this one because it was recommended to me by a coach

When I started in executive search nearly 21 years ago, the economics were simple and the logic was sound. Search firms charged 30% or more of a candidate's first-year salary and any fixed incentives. The partner I supported would walk into a business development meeting armed with two things: a foot-high stack of business cards back in the office and an intimate knowledge of his own network. He'd talk about exclusive access to candidates, relationships other firms simply did

I published a blog post early last week about how AI is reshaping the core C-suite. The piece got a decent response, but what I didn't expect was the number of direct messages that followed. Not from CEOs or CFOs. From the people who sit one layer out from that inner circle. Chief Information Officers. Chief Data Officers. Chief Strategy Officers. Chief Marketing Officers and one Chief Sustainability officer. I don't want to overstate the numbers, it was probably around 20 di

Artificial intelligence is unlikely to eliminate the top team. What it may do is change the job so fundamentally that the leaders who thrive will look quite different from those who succeeded before. For most of modern business history, the defining logic of executive hiring has been relatively simple: find someone who has done the job before. A CFO who has been CFO. A COO who has run operations at scale. A CEO who has steered a comparable ship. The pattern-matching approach

Let me be direct about something the executive hiring world rarely acknowledges. The way organisations select senior leaders hasn't meaningfully changed in thirty years. Boards define the role. Internal recruiters or executive search firms find candidates who have already done it. Interviews focus on track record, sector experience, and company scale. Maybe there's a psychometric test (all broadly testing for habitual behavioural tendencies). Eventually, someone is appointed

Growth Capacity at the individual level is not enough. An executive can be self-aware, adaptable, feedback-seeking, and cognitively flexible. They can learn fast. They can regulate emotion. They can tolerate ambiguity. And still fail . Because senior leadership is not an individual sport (regardless of what the Alpha's say). At scale, Growth Capacity becomes systemic. The question shifts from "Can this leader grow?" to "Can this leader grow others and therefore grow the syste

The stories told about great leadership are almost always about a decisive moment. The pivot. The bold call. The burning building. That makes for a great story. But it isn't the full story. Many leadership failures don't happen in explosions. They happen in fog. Slow-moving, months-long, soul-grinding fog. The market shifts gradually. The board sends mixed signals. A transformation drags on. A merger integration never quite stabilises. The technology landscape evolves faster

This is the point where many otherwise capable leaders quietly plateau. There's a question most senior leaders never think to ask themselves: Am I expanding what I can do, or am I just getting more efficient at what I've always done? It's an important distinction. Because at some point in every executive career, the thing that got you here stops being enough to get you there. You weren't promoted for your potential to figure things out on the fly. You were promoted for your t

Stop Defending, Start Growing. Most leaders claim they are open to feedback. The claim, on its own, is almost meaningless. The real question is not whether feedback reaches a leader. It is whether it survives the journey inward, whether it is processed, tolerated, and ultimately converted into changed behaviour, particularly when it threatens identity, status, or the story a leader has built about their own competence. During leadership transitions, this distinction becomes