If you asked the people I have worked alongside to describe me, two words would come up more than any others: energy and persistence. I have done my best work in situations where the answer was not yet obvious, where someone had to keep going past the first obstacle, the second, and the third, and where stamina mattered as much as judgment. That has been the consistent pattern across more than thirty years in senior corporate leadership and now in my work in executive search at Borderless. I keep going when others stop, and I tend to take the people around me with me.
I am thoughtful in how I approach people and patient about relationships. I would rather have one honest conversation that leads somewhere useful for both of us than ten superficial ones that lead nowhere. I bring to search the same instincts I brought to running businesses: take people seriously, do the unglamorous work properly, keep showing up when others have moved on, and be honest about what is actually happening rather than about what would be easier to say.
CAREER AND EXPERIENCE
My career began at Mars in 1992 and progressed through HR and general management roles at ARC International and McBride before I joined DS Smith, the FTSE 100 packaging group, in 2012. DS Smith is where the substance of my corporate career sits. I held a sequence of senior roles there, ending with a seat on the Divisional Leadership Team. The largest in scale was running the Paper Sourcing business out of Amsterdam, with around three billion euros of revenue, one and a half billion of external purchases, and 120 people across procurement, planning, finance, IT and HR.
What matters more to me than the names is the breadth: sales, marketing, human resources, supply chain and procurement. I crossed between commercial and people functions deliberately. It is how I learnt that decisions in one part of an organisation play out in another, a perspective I now bring to assessing leaders for clients.
THE OPERATOR’S EYE
My work in search is not theoretical. I have run businesses in consumer packaged goods, paper and packaging, and I know what it takes for leaders to thrive in them, who tends to struggle, and why. When I assess a candidate against a brief, I am not matching a CV against a job description. I am asking myself whether this person, with this temperament, in that culture, will be the leader the business actually needs in eighteen months, once the easy decisions have already been made.
It is hard to do that unless you have done the work. It is one of the reasons clients come back, and one of the reasons candidates rely on me to be candid about whether a role is right for them rather than simply available.
A PATTERN OF DIFFICULT WORK
For most of my career, the roles I was given were ones where something needed to change: an integration, a turnaround, a restructuring, a business that needed a new way of operating. Companies put me into those situations because something in me suited the work. I do not let problems become reasons to walk away from the people involved, and I tend to be at my best when the answer is not yet obvious to anyone in the room.
That is what I rely on most heavily now in search. Senior placements rarely follow the path the original brief sets out. The searches that have mattered most are the ones where I was prepared to stay with the problem, honestly, until the right answer for both sides became clear.
CLIENTS AND CANDIDATES
There is no difference. Both are people, usually senior, often at meaningful moments in their lives, with their own long term interests at stake. A relationship that is good for one party and bad for the other is not a relationship. I treat each conversation as the start of something that may matter to both of us for years, regardless of whether it leads to an immediate opportunity. It is what I do and what people expect of me.
A LIFE LIVED INTERNATIONALLY
My roots are in France, and my career has taken me to London, Brussels and Amsterdam. Different markets need different leadership, and an executive who has thrived in one geography will not automatically thrive in another. Recognising the difference and understanding what kind of person fits where is essential to my search work.
I am married with three children. They are part of why I am ambitious rather than a counterweight to it, and I make no apology for putting them first while still expecting a great deal of myself. Sport and travel keep me sharp, and the beliefs that show up on a bike or a court, preparation and honest effort, are what separate good days from great ones.
A MEANINGFUL CONVERSATION
What I offer is the long conversation. Executive search at its best is not a single transaction. It is a relationship that earns the right to be useful to both of us again, a year later, three or ten years later, in roles that have not yet been written. I am happy to begin one whenever it would be useful to you, whether the immediate question is a specific role, a longer-term plan, or simply a sounding board on something that is harder to discuss inside an organisation.
