Everyone who talks to you wants something.
The board wants the number. The exec team wants direction, and each member wants their own version of it. The advisers bill by the hour and the coach has a renewal coming. None of them is lying to you. All of them are managing you.
The consigliere is the deep one-to-one work of Wild Leadership. One person with no stake in your org chart, who can afford to be completely honest.
Honest company is the first thing to go.
What a chief executive loses first is not judgement. It is honest company. There are some things I cannot say hardens, over a few years, into there is nobody I can talk to. The second sentence is false. It only needs one person the system cannot reach.
Consigliere means counsellor.
The films gave it a shadow, but the job is older than the films: the adviser whose standing does not depend on the institution, and who is there for the person carrying it. That independence is the whole value. I take a board seat where it is right, and say so plainly when it is not.
What it is, and what it is not.
Retained one-to-one work. We talk when there is something to talk about. The decision you cannot take to the board. The succession thought you have not said out loud. The sense that the way you are leading no longer fits the business you have built. Nothing is off limits and nothing leaves the conversation.
Not coaching, and not a programme. There is no framework to graduate from and no deck. If what you need is a coach, I will say so and name good ones.
I have sat where you sit.
Three decades inside global agencies and private-equity-backed businesses, as chief marketing officer, managing director and board adviser. I sat in the meetings where the truth got softened. Some of the softening was mine. The longer version is here.
It starts with a clarity conversation.
An hour, no charge, and no follow-up unless you ask for one. You bring the thing that is hardest to say out loud. By the end you will know whether this is what you need, and so will I. It goes no further unless it should. The people around you manage you because it works. This is one conversation where nobody is.