About
A career measured in responsibility, not job titles.
Three decades inside consequential transformation, technology and institutional change across Europe, Asia and the United States — and the judgement that experience produced.
The useful way to read my career is not as a sequence of roles but as a widening of what I was answerable for: first systems, then programmes, then the strategic choices behind them, and now the quality of the reasoning by which those choices are made.
Most of that work was done in complex, regulated, international organisations where the difficulty is rarely technical. It is institutional: what the organisation believes about itself, what it is willing to hear, and how quickly it will revise a position once the evidence has moved.
What I contribute to a board comes from that. A respect for evidence. A habit of questioning assumptions before they harden into judgement. And a persistent interest in what belonging does to judgement — because acceptance should never require surrendering it.
Career evolution
Six stages, one direction.
01 — Technical foundations
Graduated in Business Information Systems and worked in London as a technical architect and trainer, predominantly for banking clients. Responsibility began with systems that had to work, and with explaining them to people who had to rely on them.
02 — Independent consulting
Moved to Switzerland at 25 and established a first independent business at 27. From that point the work had to be earned rather than assigned — a discipline that has shaped everything since.
03 — Global transformation
Contributed to a multi-year global digital business transformation and consolidation initiative in pharmaceuticals, to the integration of a groupware backbone during the formation of a professional-services firm, and to the delivery of a first global retail FX platform in banking. The responsibility shifted from delivery to consequence at institutional scale, always as part of large teams.
04 — Executive and digital leadership
Held a Chief Digital Officer role, and in 2011 founded a second venture dedicated to organisations undergoing strategic digital transformation. Accountability moved from programmes to the strategic choices underneath them.
05 — Board advisory
Advisory-board appointments with Jester Advisory AG, thirty3 AG and Datalynx AG — advisory roles rather than statutory directorships — alongside board-level advice on strategy, governance, risk and technology investment. The work became questioning rather than executing.
06 — Governance thought leadership
Doctoral-level teaching, the Kinetic Board series for Forbes, and the development of Board Judgement Capability as a discipline in its own right.
These are executive, consulting and advisory experiences. They were not non-executive mandates and are not presented as such, and outcomes in complex organisations are never the work of one person. These experiences shaped the judgement I now bring to board oversight.
Perspective
An international career shaped across markets, cultures and institutions.
My work has been formed across London, Zürich, Frankfurt, Tokyo and Basel, in institutions with very different regulatory expectations, decision cultures and tolerances for challenge. The cities are not the point. What matters is that the same situation is read differently depending on where the reader is standing — and that adaptability, once practised, becomes a discipline rather than a trait.
The practical consequence is a particular vantage point: close enough to an organisation to understand how it actually works, far enough outside its assumptions to notice which of them are being treated as facts. Cross-border exposure is useful only because of what it does to judgement — it makes independent perspective habitual rather than occasional.
Experience taught me to question assumptions before they harden into judgement.
Independence
Trust earned repeatedly, not accumulated once.
Most of my career has been independent rather than inside a single corporate hierarchy. There was no internal ladder to climb: each mandate had to be won, and each one ended with a client deciding whether the judgement had been worth paying for.
That is an unusual formation for a director, and I think it is the most relevant thing about it. It has meant seeing comparable institutional problems appear in different forms, in different industries, across different technological eras — often disguised as something else. And it has meant practising independence as a working habit rather than a definition on a governance chart.
Values
What I am actually like in a room.
Integrity
The willingness to hold a position when holding it is inconvenient, and to change it when the evidence changes.
Responsibility
A board seat is a duty, not a distinction. Preparation is the minimum form of respect for it.
Curiosity
The question that has not yet been asked is usually more valuable than the answer already agreed.
Constructive challenge
Challenge directed at the reasoning, never at the person — so the decision is strengthened rather than defended.
Stewardship
Judging decisions by what they leave behind: institutional capability, not the appearance of momentum.
Writing
Authorship, and its uses.
I write the Kinetic Board series for the Forbes Coaches Council — 4 of 10 articles published — developing how boards monitor signals, test assumptions and recalibrate judgement as conditions change. Original essays on Board Judgement Capability are published here, alongside an archive of earlier writing on digital business transformation.
I am also the author of 5 Souls, a novel. It proves nothing about governance, and is not offered as if it did. It reflects a longer-standing interest in human judgement, consequence, responsibility and moral choice, examined outside corporate systems.
Current roles and education
Advisory board appointments
- Jester Advisory AG
- thirty3 AG
- Datalynx AG
These are advisory-board appointments. They are not statutory directorships and are not described as such.
Governance and academic
- FT Non-Executive Director Diploma
- IMD Executive board and governance development
- MBA, Magna Cum Laude
- BSc, Business Information Systems
Formal governance education complements decades of practical experience. It does not substitute for exercised judgement.
Environments
UBS · Novartis · PwC · Fresenius · MCH Group · Philips
Banking, pharmaceuticals, professional services and technology-enabled business models — regulated environments and capital-sensitive decisions.