LEADERSHIP COACH.

John Dyson is an executive coach working with senior leaders in pharmaceutical and life sciences, industrial and manufacturing, and construction and infrastructure – drawing on 25 years at GlaxoSmithKline, a professorship at the University of Birmingham, and co-authorship of Design to Value: The Architecture of Holistic Design and Creative Technology.

I spent 25 years at GlaxoSmithKline, where I ended my career as VP, Head of Capital Strategy and Design – responsible for long-term strategic approaches to asset investment at one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies. Before that, as VP, Head of Global Project Management, I sat for years at the junction between strategy development and strategy delivery. That position gives you a very particular education. You see how organisations form intent, and then you watch what actually happens to it. The gap between the two – the organisational inertia, the missed signals, the assumptions that go unchallenged – is where most of the value gets lost. It is also where most of the interesting work is.

Since 2018, I have been Professor of Human Enterprise at the University of Birmingham, where I lecture in business strategy and project management. I work closely with global strategy and design consultancy Bryden Wood, and am co-author of Design to Value: The Architecture of Holistic Design and Creative Technology – published by RIBA – with Mark Bryden, Jaimie Johnston MBE and Martin Wood. I also chair and convene senior cross-sector conversations that bring together pharmaceutical companies, regulators, big tech, research institutions, venture capital and academia. These are not panel discussions. They are working conversations between people who rarely sit in the same room, designed to move thinking forward on the most complex problems in their fields. Seeing how the most rigorous thinkers across these sectors approach shared problems – and where their assumptions diverge – is a perspective that comes directly into my executive coaching work.

I am also a BACP-qualified counsellor – a discipline that sharpens how I read organisations, the people within them, and the dynamics that most analyses miss. The decisions that aren't being made, the relationships that are creating drag, the leadership dynamics that are costing more than any process inefficiency – these patterns are often invisible to conventional business analysis. They are not invisible to me.

What thirty years in complex organisations has taught me is that the most sustainably effective leaders are not the ones who are individually brilliant. They are the ones who build success on purposeful collaboration: the ability to work with others across networks, step outside arbitrary constraints, and create the kind of trust that makes organisations genuinely work. In industries where the stakes are real and the problems are gnarly, that is not a soft skill. It is the hardest and most valuable one.