My background.
An accomplished international professional career of more than 30 years including:
international banking (ABN AMRO, Royal Bank of Scotland, Deutsche Postbank)
global logistics and international supply chain management (Deutsche Post DHL, Panalpina, Gulf Agency Company, NFC)
SME turnaround work and entrepreneurial, startup, and creative projects
Valuable perspectives shaped by having grown up, lived, and worked in the UK, Saudi Arabia, Hong Kong, Switzerland, and Germany, and by extensive business exposure across Europe, Asia-Pacific, the Middle East, and North America.
Functional expertise from positions spanning operations, sales, marketing, product development, strategic development, corporate venturing (“intra-“preneurship), and advisory. This breadth provides a detailed end-to-end understanding of how organisations actually operate - under pressure, imperfect and in the real world.
Highlights include:
Building and exiting two strategically important corporate ventures
Designing and scaling complex, cross-border customer solutions
Developing and transferring best-practice processes across multiple regions and business units
On the market side, developed and delivered complex solutions for clients in the following industry sectors:
Fast Moving Consumer Goods
Technology / Media / Telecommunications
Retail
Apparel / Fashion / Footwear
Automotive
Financial Institutions / Insurance
Industrials
Construction
Public Sector
Having worked through multiple economic cycles and crises - from the early 1990s recession in London, through the 1997 Asia-Pacific crisis in Hong Kong, to the 2008 global financial crisis in the heart of the City of London - first-hand appreciation of what volatility, contraction, and systemic risk really look like from the inside.
Earlier in my career, more of a specialist. Today, however, driven by a curiosity and variety, I am a strategic generalist: someone able to quickly grasp context, identify what truly matters, and connect the dots across functions, markets, and disciplines.
A British citizen, a permanent resident in Germany, with a home happily in Cologne since 2003. Originally from an expatriate family and educated at the British international school Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, a boarding-grammar school in Kent, UK and the Open University in the UK and Hong Kong.
A refined international outlook and with an evolved knowledge of Germany, I also have a deep interest in the arts, culture, world affairs, people and life.