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Through my clients, I'm hearing whispers. A team here, a few folks there, quietly gone. Nothing big enough to make the news, just a creeping fog that makes it hard to know what's coming. You can't control where cuts land. But there's one thing that puts you on the front foot whichever way this goes: the people above you knowing exactly what you own. And you own a lot. A launch in four countries. A programme across nine teams with authority over none of them. The escalation no

After a layoff or when you've been on the hunt for a while, every job that half-fits looks like one you can't afford to skip. So you apply to all of them. Same level, adjacent function, the company you'd never have looked at a year ago. More applications feel like more chances, and when the clock is ticking, that's a completely reasonable instinct. It's also the one that tends to make the search longer. Every loose fit asks you to stretch your story a bit further. A paragraph

Final round. Great conversation. You walk out thinking that it's yours. Then the email: "We've decided to move forward with a candidate whose experience more closely aligns with our needs." Once is annoying. Three or four times and you start writing yourself a story about why. The market's brutal. It's a numbers game. Maybe my Amazon experience is hurting me in interviews. None of those is the most likely explanation. Getting to the final round means the hard part already hap

You're the person people call before they make a big move. The sober second opinion. The one who asks the question everyone else was too polite to. The friend who says "that's a hope, not a plan" — and means it kindly. You're very good at this. For other people. Here's what I see with senior operators, over and over: The rigour you bring to everyone else's decisions vanishes the second the decision is about your stuff. You'd never let a colleague run a search on "something wi

I'm going to tell you something that might sting. The story you lead with in interviews — the massive programme, the nine-figure impact, the team of hundreds — isn't landing the way you think it is. I was working with someone recently who is genuinely exceptional. The kind of person who built things at Amazon most companies couldn't dream of. And a contact at a startup he was targeting said it to his face: "You're talking about Amazon scale and Amazon resources. That's very d

A client spent most of an hour last week making the case for his next role. Airtight. Logical. Exactly the thinking that got him promoted five times. Then he heard himself. What he'd just described — a bigger P&L, more scope, more people — was his current job with the volume turned up. Including the parts he couldn't stand. The reviews, the reporting, the managing of managers: all of it scales with scope. He wasn't describing a dream. He was describing his current misery, sup