I have spent more than forty years learning how organisations and the people inside them actually work. Not in theory, and not from a distance, but through the kind of sustained, direct engagement that produces something more useful than expertise: judgment. More than twenty of those years came at board level in corporate leadership. The rest, and counting, has come from building Borderless. That judgment is what I bring to every conversation and every boardroom I enter.
I am direct, sometimes sharply so, and consistently committed to the people I work with. I am patient, and least tolerant of bad faith. I use language and humour as working tools, to make difficult things easier to say and easier to hear, and to release the kind of unproductive tension that prevents honest conversations from going where they need to go.
I am as comfortable counselling a younger professional working out what to do, and why, as I am advising a chief executive navigating a decision that cannot be shared with anyone inside the organisation. Both conversations matter to me, and I bring the same quality of attention to each.
CAREER AND EXPERIENCE
I began my career at The Dow Chemical Company, where I held senior executive positions on management boards in the Netherlands, Belgium, South Africa and France, and served on the board of the company’s Turkish business. I led international units in life sciences, chemicals, plastics and construction products at a time when genuinely international leadership was far less common than it has since become. Those years taught me how large, complex organisations function under pressure, how leadership teams cohere or fracture, and what it takes to make consequential decisions when no obvious answer is available.
In 1997 I co-founded Borderless Executive Search around a different set of principles: transparency, a transnational approach to talent, and quality of outcome rather than volume of activity. The firm’s view, and mine, is that clients and candidates are not on opposite sides of a transaction. They are people whose long term interests are usually in step. That belief has shaped not only how Borderless works but how the people inside it think about their responsibilities and act accordingly. Almost thirty years on, the firm focuses on senior leadership in life sciences and the global chemical value chain, the sectors I know best from my Dow years.
Across both halves of my career I have lived and worked in the United Kingdom, France, South Africa, Switzerland and Belgium. That breadth of direct experience across cultures gives my counsel a grounded quality that is difficult to replicate from a more settled vantage point.
THE TRUSTED CONVERSATION PARTNER
One of the most valuable things I provide is also one of the least visible. Chief executives operate in a particular kind of isolation. The people around them have stakes in the outcome, dependencies on the decision, and interests that are rarely declared. Finding someone who will ask the right question from a position of independence, whose only investment is in your success and wellbeing, is harder than it sounds and more important than most leaders admit.
For a number of senior leaders, I am exactly that person: a trusted, discreet conversation partner who listens without agenda, challenges without self-interest, and brings a perspective that is almost impossible to find inside the organisation. The chief executive on the eve of an acquisition decision. The founder thinking about succession. The chair handling a board member who is no longer pulling his weight. Each conversation is different, and each tends to begin with the same statement, that there is no one else inside the organisation the person can put it to.
It is what happens when experience, curiosity about people, and the discretion to hold what you are told in complete confidence come together. The conversations that matter most rarely leave a trace. Their value shows up later, in the quality of the decisions that follow, and often in the relief of having put it to someone.
LEARNING BY DOING
I learn by doing. More recently that has meant engaging directly with artificial intelligence as a builder, not an observer: I have developed and deployed AI tools internally at Borderless, and have published a mobile application for executive onboarding independently, from concept to live product, on iOS and Android. This is not a late conversion to technology. It is an expression of a habit of mind that has defined me throughout my career, the belief that understanding something properly means engaging with it directly. I am an INSEAD alumnus and a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing. Learning by doing is not a philosophy for me. It is how I operate.
GOVERNANCE AND NEXT CHAPTER
I served as Board President of Antwerp International School for six years, which deepened my understanding of institutional governance and the particular responsibilities of a non-executive leader. I write and comment independently on corporate transformation and leadership. I am now working towards non-executive director roles in medium- to-large companies, particularly in manufacturing, chemicals and adjacent sectors, where an experienced and independent board voice can be useful.
A CONVERSATION
If you are working through something important, whether a current decision, a longer-term plan, the right person for a senior role, or simply something that is harder to discuss inside the organisation, I am happy to begin a conversation. I am easy to reach.
