Insights

Most organisations now have five or more senior technology leaders. CIOs, CTOs, data and AI leaders, CISOs and product leaders all hold mandates that increasingly overlap, and AI is accelerating the change. Some roles are multiplying. Others are merging or disappearing. The research is consistent: performance follows clear decision rights and real authority, not the number of senior titles. Yet few organisations have deliberately designed who decides, who can veto and who sim

The knowledge that doesn't travel with you Think back to the last time you moved into a new organisation. In all likelihood, you had spent years becoming good at your previous job. You knew the business, understood the people, and had built both a network of relationships and a reputation to go with it. You knew who to speak to when something needed doing, which colleagues you could rely on, and how to navigate the occasional difficult conversation. Just as importantly, you u

Ask an operating partner which executive role is hardest to fill in a portfolio company and you will hear a few answers. CFO's are hard to find with the right deal experience. Good CEO's are always scarce. But in our work, the technology leadership role is the one that most often takes longer than planned, attracts the wrong shortlist, or derails in the first year. It is not because there is a shortage of capable CIO's and CTO's. It is because the role inside a portfolio comp

Rethinking the Second Half of an Executive Career I've written about ageism before, and I didn't expect to return to it so soon. Over the past few months, though, I've had more and more conversations with exceptional senior leaders who are struggling to find their next role. These are people with genuinely stellar careers, and they haven't lost their edge. They're thoughtful, curious and highly capable, and many are more self-aware now than at any earlier point in their worki

We've spent years telling technology leaders to become better business leaders. But as technology becomes more important to the business, what should happen to the expertise that got them there? For years we've been telling technology leaders they need to become better business leaders, and I've probably said it a few hundred times myself. Understand strategy, learn the numbers, influence your peers, talk to the board, understand customers, build great teams, stop disappearin

How much of executive success belongs to the executive, and how much is created by the environment around them? We talk about successful executives as though success is something they possess. She transformed the business. He rebuilt the tech function. She doubled revenue. He led the turnaround. They took the company through an IPO. They did this. They did that...... Those achievements matter. Of course they do. I've spent more than 20 years assessing executives this way. Muc

"Must have previous CIO experience." It's one of the most common lines in a CIO brief, and on the face of it, it makes perfect sense. If you're about to make one of the most important appointments in the business, hiring someone who's held the title before feels like a sensible way to reduce risk. Except there's a problem. There isn't really one version of the CIO job. A CIO brought in to stabilise a complex estate, improve resilience and take out cost isn't doing the same jo

The job keeps reshaping itself. Here's how to hire for a role that refuses to sit still. For HR leaders and boards hiring at the top of technology. For most of this century, the story of technology leadership has been a story of multiplication. One title became many. The CIO and CTO were joined by the Chief Digital Officer, then the Chief Data Officer and Chief Information Security Officer and most recently the Chief AI Officer. Each new role arrived to provide a depth of exp

Most companies give a new senior hire about a year and then judge them on results. This looks like the responsible thing to do. It's certainly what we've historically done, but is it actually a way of watching the wrong metrics until it's too late to act on them. Judge a new CEO on their first-year numbers and you're mostly measuring the trajectory they walked into. Prior built firm performance carries significant momentum forward. It reflects the previous strategy, the stat

I ended my Linkedin post yesterday with a question. The question was this. If the conditions an organisation creates matter so much to whether a new leader succeeds, why do some executives navigate a difficult, under-supported transition well, reading the room quickly, adjusting as they go, building trust before anyone hands it to them, while others who are no less capable never find their footing? That difference is the subject of this piece. The organisation's responsibilit

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