Hello! I’m Sam,
Nice to Meet You.
Let’s start with a brief history
In 1998 I joined the Amazon start up team, when the business was only 6 months old and exactly as insane as you might imagine.An environment like this breeds its own entrepreneurs and many of the people I worked alongside went on to build or lead their own businesses. At some point, each of those businesses hit a wall, fast, with no time to figure it out from scratch and those same people would ask the same question: who used to make this kind of pain disappear when we were at Amazon? That would be me.So I spent the next ten years running into other people's burning buildings, putting out fires and re-building businesses or parts of business from the ashes.Amazon was over 25 years ago. Since then I’ve gone on to help companies like Wickes and Dr Martens plus a long list of businesses small and large in between. I generally have a lofty title such as Head of Change or Director of Transformation but the mission is always the same, help everyone in the business see the real system underneath the stated strategy or problem, then build the practical conditions that allow people, process and or technology to work together seamlessly.
This is me
What I see
Collaboration between Blue Yonder and DM’s Teams
Some light team building before a complex strategy meeting at Wickes
When I see a business under pressure, the stated problem is rarely the whole story, good intention and simple solutions to seemingly simple problems often becomes stuck because too many things are tangled together: process, technology, behaviour, incentives, capacity, politics, history and fear.
A team seen as “resistant” is maybe overloaded, unclear, or compensating for poor design. A system implementation that “isn’t landing” may really be an operating model issue. A transformation programme that looks fine in a steerco may be quietly held together by workarounds, heroic individuals and a spreadsheet called FINAL_final_USE_THIS_ONE_v7 that everyone pretends not to be relying on. Whatever the cause it's never just one thing, problems are never created in isolation and therefore neither are their solutions.
My role? Is to help separate the noise from the reality and create an business environment that is able to develop meaningful and lasting solutions that the entire business can believe in and implement.