your strategy
is sound.
Your Org
Isn't.
Executive advisor to senior operators running systems that aren't producing what the strategy promised.
THE REALITY
The strategy was approved.
The team is capable.
The budget is in place.
Six months later,
the numbers aren't moving and the board is asking why.
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The strategy doesn't reach the work
The team you have is the team the system produced
The reviews are green right up until they aren't
The deck got approved. Six months later, the work people are actually doing has drifted from what the strategy described. Nobody decided this. It happened in the seams between functions.
Capable people leave. Mediocre people stay. The system selects for what it rewards. How the reward structure got that way doesn't matter. It's yours now.
Status reports glow green. Dashboards look healthy. Then a quarter goes sideways and everyone wants to know why nobody saw it coming. They didn't see it coming because the system was structured to hide it.
AN OPERATOR'S LENS.
Most consultants will map your org, hand you a deck, and leave.
I don't do that. I come in as an operator.
Six years embedded inside Fortune 500 leadership teams at McChrystal Group, and two decades before that as a Marine Corps Infantry Officer with combat command. I know the difference between a system that looks right on paper and one that actually runs.
The senior operators I work with don't need more analysis. They need someone who can sit in the seat with them, find where the system is breaking, and rebuild the structure that has to deliver.
This is the work that doesn't fit in a deck.
THE APPROACh
IF THIS IS YOUR SEAT.
CEOs, COOs, CXOs, and division presidents at mid-market organizations. Typically $25M to $250M in revenue, 100 to 1,500 people.
The trigger is the same regardless of how they got to the seat: the system isn't working, and they're running it. A board question landed. A senior left. A customer escalation showed the gap. A quarter missed badly.
Industry-agnostic. The patterns repeat across technology, healthcare, financial services, professional services, and manufacturing. The fault isn't in your industry. The fault is in the system underneath your operating cadence.
WHO I WORK WITH
HOW WE ENGAGE
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SIX-MONTH EXECUTIVE ADVISORY
ALIGNMENT DIAGNOSTICS
STRATEGIC OFFSITES & KEYNOTES
Six months embedded with you and your senior team. The work is the structure underneath your operating cadence, not the team running on top of it. We map decision rights, redesign reporting, rebuild the cadence, and stay through implementation. By month six, the system runs without me.
A focused, time-bounded engagement to surface where strategy is breaking down before deciding whether deeper work is needed. Typically 30 to 60 days. Output is a written architecture of where the system fails and what it would take to fix it.
For senior teams entering quarterly or annual planning, or for executive audiences at conferences. Built around the HABIT framework when it fits. Built around your specific operating questions when it doesn't.
FOCUSED ENGAGEMENTS FOR FOCUSED RESULTS.
PROOF
A PATTERN I SEE OFTEN
I was invited to sit in on a quarterly review. One executive was mid-drone, talking strategic synchronization. Slide 14 beamed a beautiful green light behind him. Everyone nodded like dashboard dogs.
Three floors below, the project team he was reporting on was in open revolt. The team lead had walked out the week before. The "on-target" project was a pile of unfinished ideas held together by deadline pressure and quiet panic.
The slide stayed green. Not because anyone was lying. In this organization, Red was treated as a failure of character. The person who flagged Red got asked what was wrong with them. The person who kept the slide green got asked nothing. So the slides stayed green. The decisions got made on fiction.
Senior operators don't see this pattern until something breaks visibly. A board meeting that goes sideways. A customer escalation that traces back six months. The slide stayed green right up until it didn't.
The system was structured to hide it. This is the kind of work an embedded advisory engagement uncovers and rebuilds.
THE BOOK
THE THINKING, IN WRITING.
The Alignment Habit* is the book version of the framework I use inside engagements.
New edition has a foreword by General Stanley McChrystal.
If you want to know how I think before we talk, start there.
ABOUT TODD
Forged in the Gap Between Intent and Impact.
Six years as Partner at McChrystal Group, embedded with Fortune 500 leadership teams across technology, healthcare, oil and gas, and finance. The work sat where leadership behavior meets organizational design.
Two decades before that as a U.S. Marine Corps Infantry Officer, including combat command in Iraq and operations at NATO. The kind of environments where misalignment doesn't produce a bad quarter. It produces casualties.
I come in as an operator, not a consultant. The discipline of high-stakes command applied to the work of redesigning the system underneath your strategy.
Author of The Alignment Habit, with a foreword by
General Stanley McChrystal.
READY TO TALK?
If you're running a system that isn't producing what the strategy promised, the conversation is worth having.
The first call is 30 minutes. No pitch, no deck, no methodology overview, no homework to prepare. We talk about what's breaking in your seat, and whether the work I do is the right fit for it. If it isn't, I'll tell you that.
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