Eighteen years running it. Now sitting with the people who have to.

I am David Nagtzaam. I spent eighteen years inside companies going through change they did not fully control, first building the technology and later carrying the number. Some of it worked. A fair amount of it did not, and those are the parts I am most useful about.

Now I hold a select number of private counsel relationships with chief executives and founders, and I take a handful of single decisions a year for people who are not ready to commit to more than that.

The record, in specifics.

Most of what is useful to the people I work with, I learned in the years I was getting it wrong. This is where that happened.

DECODEsince 2022: Advising boards and executive teams through AI transformation, in Europe, the United States and the Gulf. Governance and capability more than technology: what to build, what to refuse, who has to change their mind first.
Philip Morris International2017 to 2022: Entrepreneur in Residence to senior leadership for four years, across three mandates in Benelux, Global and Europe, while the company replaced its own core product and disrupted the industry it led. The mandate was governance and capability: making a structure built for the business they were leaving work for the one they were building. Set up the first regional digital hub, across 28 markets. Awarded PMI’s ABCD for performance above the scope of the role.
Seventh Media2014 to 2017: Co-founded it, ran the technology, exited to McCann in 2017. Both sides of an acquisition conversation, including the part nobody writes about afterwards.
McCann Worldgroup2014 to 2016: Brought in to make a creative organisation digital and data-driven. Built the capability and the teams, then embedded evidence in a process that had always run on instinct. The structure took months. Persuading people whose craft was being questioned took the rest.
Google2008 to 2010: Search quality in the Netherlands, and a team of six, at twenty four. First time accountable for other people’s judgment rather than my own output. I was not good at it for a while.

Eighteen years of it. I have been on the wrong side of enough of these decisions to know what they cost.

David has one of the most broad-based minds I have ever seen, seamlessly able to switch between the geek world and the high-level strategic world, without a missing beat.

Michael SmolensChairman and Founder, DotSub

Where the record was earned

Quoted in

Why I moved to this, and why now.

For most of those years, the part of the job I was best at was not the strategy. It was the twenty minutes before the meeting, with one person, working out what they actually thought before they had to say it in front of eleven people. I did not have a name for that then. It turns out to be the whole job.

The other half of the answer is less flattering. I have been the person who made the confident call in the room and then sat in the car afterwards with nobody sensible to check it with. That is a specific and quite lonely experience, and it is the reason I take this work seriously rather than treating it as a second career with better hours.

Operating experience on its own is not enough, which is why I trained formally and hold a credential. Judgment and method are different things. Plenty of people who have run companies give terrible advice, usually by answering the question they once faced rather than the one in front of them.

What I am like in the room.

Direct, and slower than you expect. I ask a lot of questions before I offer anything, and I will say plainly when I think you are wrong, which is the thing most people say they want and fewer people enjoy in the moment.

I do not do encouragement as a service. If something you have done is good I will say so once, and then we will move on to the part that is not.

One thing I am not good at, since it is fair to know before you commit a year: I am impatient with detail I consider settled. If you need someone to work through an operating plan line by line with you, that is a real need and I am the wrong person for it. Say so early and I will point you at someone better.

The first conversation

If that sounds like the person you have been looking for.

Most people who write to me have been turning something over for months without saying it out loud to anyone. That is the conversation. Half an hour, and by the end one of us says whether this is right.

Apply for a place

Twelve months. Eight relationships at a time.