May 18, 2026
never there. Most companies discover they'd built a person, not operations. At scale, you don't discover your operations. You discover whether you ever had them.
May 20, 2026
The succession plan is up to date. The board approved it last quarter. It won't survive the first real test. Succession documents create the illusion of control. The document protects the board. The conversation protects the company.
May 22, 2026
His CRM was empty. His close rate led the company. The VP of Sales wanted him gone. Mexico didn't underperform — the management model did. What happens when U.S. sales systems collide with Mexican relationship architecture, and what the right commercial leader for this market actually looks like.
May 25, 2026
PE asks the CHRO to execute layoffs, retain survivors, and build the leadership bench — simultaneously. These objectives don't just conflict. They require opposite organizational signals. Why the CHRO role in private equity is structurally contradictory, what the three tensions look like in practice, and what the specific profile actually requires.
May 27, 2026
In a family business, the CFO isn't managing numbers — they're translating between generations. And every translation favors one side. What happens when that translation goes wrong, the three traps that claim most family business CFOs, and what the right calibration actually requires.
May 29, 2026
Early action is visible. Understanding isn't. The pressure new executives face to move fast in the first thirty days produces changes based on the previous organization's conditions, not the current one's — and those early moves cost more to reverse than they gained. What the formation lap principle reveals about how the best leaders actually start.
June 1, 2026
The resume tells you what they've done. References tell you what others remember. Neither tells you whether they will work here. After twenty years placing C-suite leaders across the U.S. and Mexico, one conviction has survived every search, every miss, every surprising success: the right hire is a function of calibration, not talent. The three signals that predict executive success more reliably than credentials — and how great searches start differently.
June 3, 2026
Most companies ask whether to hire a search firm after the brief is written and the urgency is high. The better question is earlier: have you actually defined what the role requires — not the title, but the conditions? A search firm earns its fee not by finding names, but by calibrating the hire to the conditions the company is entering. Not a Rolodex. A calibration system.
June 5, 2026
Six team principals in four years. Each one was supposed to fix the problem. None stayed long enough to find out whether they could. Before you replace a leader, one question: why did the last three fail? If every leader fails in the same system, the leader is not the pattern. The system is.
June 8, 2026
Nobody sat in a boardroom and designed an impossible CHRO mandate. It happened one reasonable request at a time — DEI, mental health, employer brand, AI workforce planning, culture architecture — each sounding manageable in isolation. The accumulation is the problem. What boards must answer before the next CHRO search starts.
June 10, 2026
The counterintuitive hire is not a gamble. It only looks like one when the search is built around credentials instead of conditions. Why the candidate who makes the committee nervous is sometimes the only one calibrated for the role — and the three dimensions that checklists systematically underweight.
June 12, 2026
Most U.S. companies aren't missing Guadalajara's executive talent because it's hidden. They're missing it because their assessment model was built for another market — one that rewards pedigree, penalizes geography, and mistakes cost-of-living for value creation. The talent was never missing. The lens was.