Essay 02

The Five Mandates Behind Every Executive Hire

For a long time, I couldn't explain something that kept happening. I would work with two executives. One was a Chief Marketing Officer. The other was a Chief Operating Officer. Different industries. Different careers. Different CVs. Yet I found myself giving them almost exactly the same advice. That didn't make sense. If executive hiring was really about functions, why were the same conversations happening across Marketing, Finance, Operations and HR? So I started looking somewhere else. Not at the executives. At the companies.

That's when I noticed something. Companies don't wake up thinking: "We need another CFO." Or... "Let's hire a Head of Marketing." They wake up thinking: "We need to enter a new market." "Growth has stalled." "This transformation is behind schedule." "We need to regain customers' trust." "This business has become too complex." In other words... They aren't hiring functions. They're hiring change.

That observation changed the way I looked at executive careers. After hundreds of conversations, I realised that almost every senior leadership role could be explained by one of only five business mandates.

Build

Create something that doesn't yet exist. A business. A capability. A market. A function. Builders reduce uncertainty where nothing exists yet.

Scale

Take something that already works and make it work consistently at a larger scale. More customers. More countries. More complexity. Scalers don't invent. They multiply.

Elevate

Take something that is already good and make it exceptional. Raise standards. Increase quality. Differentiate. Elevators don't repair. They refine.

Fix

Solve a business problem. Restore performance. Simplify complexity. Rebuild trust. Fixers create stability when organisations need it most.

Revive

Bring back momentum. Restore relevance. Reconnect people to purpose. Revivers don't start again. They help organisations rediscover what made them successful.

Most executives have created more than one kind of change during their career. But one usually appears again and again. That pattern matters. Not because it defines you. Because it explains why companies keep trusting you with certain kinds of challenges. That is your archetype.

And once you understand it, something interesting happens. Your CV becomes easier to write. Your networking conversations become easier to remember. Your interviews become easier to prepare. Because you stop describing your career. You start describing the change you've repeatedly been trusted to create.

I don't believe companies hire the most impressive executive. I believe they hire the executive whose evidence best matches the change they need. That is the foundation of the Business Archetype Framework. And it all begins with one question. Not: "What have you done?" But: "What kind of change have you repeatedly been trusted to create?"