My career has run on new business areas and new openings

My story

Two things shaped me. Leading across eight markets at Microsoft, and being self-employed, where it’s entirely on me whether a new idea finds customers and turns into a business.

The same arc runs through everything I do. Spot an opening, make it concrete, set a direction, organise the work, and bring along the people who’ll keep it alive.

Business and technology from the start

I trained in IT and spent ten years in international technology companies before Microsoft. It taught me early to understand what the technology could do without losing the question that actually matters: what does this mean for the customer, the organisation and the business?

International leadership, in practice

Across 15 years at Microsoft I ran commercial teams spread over European markets. That’s where I learned that a clear direction and hard numbers aren’t the opposite of treating people well. They tend to arrive together.

Closer to building it, and to changing it

As an independent, and as Consulting & Delivery Director at Encodify, I got much closer to the practical end of it: roles, capacity, what actually reaches the customer, how people work together, and the choices that decide whether a change holds.

And the parts that didn’t work

I’ve got it wrong plenty of times too. In one company we steered by a capacity figure that had been wrong for years before I managed to prove it. I should have picked that fight earlier. It cost us time and execution muscle at a moment when we had neither to spare.

That’s here because it belongs here. A leader who can only tell you about the wins either hasn’t looked hard enough or doesn’t know themselves very well. And if you can’t be honest about your own mistakes, you won’t get that honesty back from the team, which is the thing you actually needed.