After graduating in physics in the UK, I started my career in the Energy industry in 1981. Two months after  graduation, I found myself in southern Patagonia in Argentina with a pair of boots, a  hard-hat, lots of expectations and not a little anxiety.

Nobody spoke English, there was no internet, the telephones were unreliable and expensive.  A letter took more than two months to arrive from Europe.  I remember returning to the UK for the first time on vacation after an absence of almost two years.

Oilfield life was hard work, wild, exciting and often dangerous. After Patagonia, I spent periods in the jungles of Bolivia, the remote south of Chile, the arid north of Brazil, then on to assignments in Venezuela, back to Argentina, Holland, the UK, India, the United Arab Emirates, Angola and Spain. I worked for two multi-nationals, changing company only once, mid-career. 

I held diverse management positions, covering Operations, Marketing and Business development, Commercialization, Asset management, Process improvement and Customer/Supplier interface management.

With every assignment my experience grew in dealing with the challenges of  working in diverse cultures, the resolution of operation and contractual problems, negotiations large and small and of course, the ever-present challenge of doing more with less - cost reduction!

Throughout these 40 years of international business, relationships between people and the functioning of teams and meetings have always interested me. Meetings, projects, initiatives always involve teams of people discussing – or more often than not, arguing!

Brilliant people, not-so-brilliant people, aggressive people, ambitious people, loud people, quiet people, you name it. I can say that the majority of the thousands of meetings in which I have participated, in terms of productivity, could have been better!

So, with time, I began to develop myself as a facilitator, trying to bring order and process as well as transferring the skills to the people with whom I worked.

It is amazing how meetings are such an essential element of business, involve enormous time and resources (and costs), but as a tool, a process or a culture in a company, receive very little attention as a tool in terms of looking for deficiencies and seeking improvement. 

I spend most of my time speaking Spanish these days (I live in Spain)  and, after years in Brazil and Angola, I can handle myself well enough in Portuguese.

Through this independent consultancy, my aim is to help  companies make their business more profitable and efficient, and I  base my work methodology on the belief that the employees of a company already hold many ideas for improvement. 

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