We re-architected executive search as governance intelligence software — not as a relationship business.
Boards no longer accept opinion-led shortlists, recycled candidate inventories, or single-page CEO recommendations defended by partner reputation. We replaced that operating model with an empirical engine: continuous behavioural telemetry, an encoded 36-jurisdiction skills matrix, and an auditable successor-ranking model under permanent refresh.
The SHREK firms optimise for partner relationships. Boards now require evidence.
The five legacy executive search incumbents — Spencer Stuart, Heidrick & Struggles, Russell Reynolds, Egon Zehnder and Korn Ferry — were architected for a world where shortlist construction was a private craft, candidate inventories were closed loops, and chair confidence was sustained by partner tenure rather than reproducible evidence. That operating model is no longer fiduciarily defensible.
Regulators in 36 jurisdictions now require boards to demonstrate succession depth, skills-matrix coverage and risk-oversight competence under formal attestation. Activist capital reads board composition empirically and asks why incumbents remained. Class-action exposure attaches to opinion-led director selection. The CEO transition itself, mispriced, destroys median market cap of 4–7% in the first 90 days.
We built Executive Search to retire that exposure. Every engagement runs on the same evidentiary infrastructure: telemetry capture, derailment modelling, jurisdictional skills calibration, auditable ranking, and a hash-chained record that a chair can produce in any forum — to a regulator, an activist, a court, or a successor board.
We are not faster SHREK. We are the empirical replacement for SHREK.
Behavioural telemetry events ingested into the governance engine, refreshed continuously.
Chair-level mandates delivered across listed, sovereign and regulated entities.
Regulatory regimes encoded into the skills-matrix and disclosure logic.
Observed reduction in 24-month CEO derailment vs. SHREK comparator cohort.
Median 72 hours to defensible slate vs. 8–12 weeks for incumbent retained search.
Per-executive behavioural, regulatory and performance signals under continuous refresh.
Inference latency on the live successor-ranking model under board-grade load.
Every shortlist, score and ranking decision is hash-chained and reproducible.
Sydney, Singapore, London, New York, Dubai — anchored to discrete regulatory regimes.
Sectors where the governance pressure-points are highest.
Each sector below carries a distinct combination of regulatory exposure, key-person concentration and successor-pool thinness. We calibrate the skills matrix and the derailment model to the dominant governance regimes of each.
APRA, PRA, OCC and MAS prudential scrutiny demands defensible CEO and CRO bench depth.
Group supervisory colleges expect succession evidence for chief actuary, CRO and CEO simultaneously.
Transition-era boards must price climate-strategy capability against operational continuity risk.
SOCI Act and equivalents require demonstrable continuity-of-leadership planning under attestation.
FDA, TGA and EMA enforcement exposure makes regulatory reflex a non-negotiable successor attribute.
Cleared-personnel constraints narrow the candidate universe and demand a pre-vetted successor inventory.
Founder-to-operator transitions remain the single highest-failure-rate CEO succession class on record.
Activist letter risk and key-person disclosures force continuously priced bench liquidity.
Cross-border governance scrutiny requires audit-grade evidence of successor selection logic.
REIT boards face concentrated CEO key-person risk against thinly traded successor pools.
Spectrum and national-security obligations narrow the defensible candidate set substantially.
Programme-cycle leadership tenure mismatch creates structural succession fragility.
Partners who built the IP — and the regional Managing Partners who deliver it.
Executive Search is led by a firm-wide partnership and a Managing Partner in each geographic region. We hire PhDs, ex-regulators, ex-quants and ex-Big-Four governance partners — not generic consultants. Practice leads sit on engagements; they do not delegate to associates.
Leadership composition is engineered, not incidental. Across firm leadership and the regional Managing Partners, gender representation is held at an exact 50/50 split and is reported transparently below each tier.
Firm Leadership
Founded the firm and authored the derailment-vector model that underpins every CEO succession architecture we deliver. Personally chairs the Partnership Council and ratifies every Code-Named mandate.
ASX Corporate Governance Principles 4th ed. · UK Corporate Governance Code · BIS Principles for Effective Risk Aggregation.
Owns the seven-dimension Cognitive Architecture Stack and the behavioural telemetry pipeline serving 1,847,000 assessments. Chairs the Model Governance Council that signs every board-grade output.
Singapore MAS FEAT Principles · US NIST AI Risk Management Framework · EU AI Act (high-risk system obligations).
Maintains the firm's 36-jurisdiction skills matrix and the cross-border data-residency framework. Personally interfaces with the regulators that calibrate our successor-attribute weightings.
EU CSDDD · UK FCA SMCR · Singapore MAS Code of Corporate Governance · APRA CPS 511.
Owns the firm's NDA-by-default discretion framework and the litigation-defensibility standard of every shortlist we deliver. Issues every engagement letter and runs the Conflicts Council.
UK Data Protection Act 2018 · EU GDPR Article 32 · Australian Privacy Act APPs · NDA-by-default global protocol.
Operationalises every engagement across the five pillars and runs the firm's ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type II programmes. Sets the delivery cadence and resilience posture for live mandates.
ISO/IEC 27001:2022 · AICPA SOC 2 Type II · UK PRA/FCA SS1/21 Operational Resilience.
Regional Managing Partners
Anchors the firm's chair-and-board practice across Australia, New Zealand and the South Pacific. Personally counsel to 47 listed-entity chairs and the architect of the Board Effectiveness Telemetry stack now used across the region.
ASX Corporate Governance Principles 4th ed. · APRA CPS 511 · SOCI Act 2018 (critical infrastructure).
Leads engagements across Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea and the wider ASEAN footprint. Architected the cross-jurisdictional successor-attribute calibration that allows a single mandate to satisfy MAS, SFC and FSA disclosure standards simultaneously.
Singapore MAS Code of Corporate Governance · SGX Listing Rules · Hong Kong SFC Code on Corporate Governance Practices.
Owns the EMEA practice across the UK, EEA, the Nordics and South Africa. Personally led 38 chair-level succession mandates and built the firm's interface with the European supervisory colleges and the UK Senior Managers Regime.
UK FRC Corporate Governance Code · UK FCA SMCR · EU CSDDD · German DCGK.
Leads engagements across the United States, Canada and Latin America. Architected the firm's algorithmic counter-factual slate construction now used to defend every Russell-3000 successor selection we publish.
SEC Reg S-K Item 407 · NYSE & Nasdaq listing standards · OCC heightened standards · NACD Director Professionalism Principles.
Anchors engagements across the GCC, the Levant and sub-Saharan Africa. Personally counsel to sovereign-fund and royal-court mandates and the architect of the firm's sovereign-capital briefing protocol.
DFSA · ADGM FSRA · Saudi CMA Corporate Governance Regulations · Mubadala / PIF sovereign-fund governance protocols.
Five offices, each anchored to a discrete regulatory regime.
ASX Corporate Governance Principles 4th ed., APRA CPS 511, SOCI Act.
MAS Code of Corporate Governance, SGX Listing Rules, HKEX cross-listing.
UK Corporate Governance Code, FCA SMCR, PRA Senior Managers Regime.
NYSE & Nasdaq listing standards, SEC cyber and disclosure rules, OCC heightened standards.
DFSA, ADGM, Saudi CMA, sovereign-fund governance protocols.
Board-grade infrastructure — the same standard we expect of the entities we advise.
Information security management certified across all engagement infrastructure.
Continuous controls attestation over security, availability and confidentiality.
All telemetry, candidate dossiers and board reports encrypted with rotating keys.
EU, UK, Australia, Singapore and US data domiciled and processed in-region by default.
Seven-year hash-chained retention of every shortlist, score and recommendation.
Every engagement opens under heightened confidentiality posture unless explicitly relaxed.
If your board can no longer defend an opinion-led successor recommendation, this is the firm to call.
Proposals are returned within 48 hours. Initial conversations are held under heightened confidentiality posture, jurisdiction-aware NDA by default.