Strategic clarity and alignment · AI and data initiatives
Strategy that holds.
You will get the technology right. Whether it was aimed at the right thing, and whether your organization can actually deliver it, is what decides the return.
Free, 15 minutes, no pitch. A conversation about where you are.
New territory
There is no playbook for this yet.
You are running a transformation with real money and real people attached. A data or AI investment. A restructure. A new operating model. And you do not have a chief data officer to hand it to, because you cannot justify the hire.
The technology has a roadmap. The human side has your instincts, because nobody has written that part down yet. Everyone is figuring this out at the same time, including the companies selling you the tools.
Sometimes you do not need an answer yet. You need to know which question is worth the money.
Established companies and funded startups, roughly 50 to 1,000 people. Big enough that the decisions carry real weight. Small enough that there is nobody in-house who has made them before.
What I usually find
The strategy is rarely the problem.
It is almost always one of these. Someone in your company already knows about every one of them. The work is making it sayable.
- Every team is busy and the roadmap is full. You cannot say with confidence that the work in flight produces what you promised.
- The dependency that blocked you last month was knowable in week two. Nobody was looking across.
- You have asked for risks. You get status.
- You have paid for this analysis before. It is in a deck somewhere. Nothing changed.
- The analysis supports the decision. The decision was made first.
- Your best people spend their week on rework and meetings about the work.
- You find out something is broken when it is already a blocker.
What separates the 12%
It is almost never the technology.
What the CEOs report
56%
have seen no return from AI
12%
have seen real return
PwC 29th Global CEO Survey2026 · 4,454 CEOs across 95 countries
What the data leaders report
91%
name culture and change management
9%
name technology
MIT Sloan Management Review2025 · Hoque, Davenport and Nelson
Meet Lara
I sat in the seat that sees every function.
Thirteen years in enterprise data and analytics, at Twilio, at Rackspace, with teams on four continents. Data and IT are the one place in a company that sees the entire cross-section. Marketing sees marketing. Operations sees operations. Data sees all of it, because eventually every decision in the building becomes a row in a table.
That is why I can see where the work connects and where it quietly does not. It is not a talent. It is a vantage point, and I had it for thirteen years.
From that seat I have led hundreds of integrated planning efforts: the initiative down to the task, and across every function it touched.
I did it as the right hand to CIOs, CDAOs, and CMOs, in the room where the call gets made.
I left the politics and the posturing, the rooms where the same decision comes back for the fourth time and the wrong problems get the attention, to work with companies that actually want the change to stick.
20+ years leading teams through change · 13 inside enterprise data at Twilio & Rackspace · Right hand to CIOs, CDAOs, CMOs · Teams across four continents · McKinsey Academy Hispanic & Latino Executive Leadership Certification · ICF Trained Coach
The approach
How the work goes.
Three movements. Skip the first and the other two get expensive.
Most engagements answer the question you asked. This one starts by checking whether it is the right question. What you are actually solving for. What you promised your stakeholders. Which use cases earn their place and why. And whether the data is guiding the decision, or ratifying one that was already made. I find it through empathy interviews, the design-thinking method for surfacing what people know and have not said.
Solve it inside one function and you get a solution for one function. This is the work across: initiative down to task, and out through every function it touches. Dependencies mapped before they are blockers. Risks named while they are still cheap. Solutions that lift every boat, rather than fixing one team at another's expense.
A plan nobody adopts is a document. A model nobody acts on is interesting information collecting dust. This is the work that changes that: workflows, enablement, training, who owns what, and moving your team on to the work only they can do. It scales, they use it, and it survives my leaving.
Where it held
Still running without me.
I learned this at enterprise scale and bring it to companies your size. Most of this work is confidential, so I describe the shape rather than the client. References available, privately, on request.
I aligned a 7,000-person company around one shared source of truth, with real adoption rather than mandate, and led it as the internal consultant with no outside firm. Twelve years later it still runs, because the people made it theirs. The measure of every engagement since has been the same: it stands on its own, without me.
I led the integrated planning across a 700-person scaled agile transformation: twenty-five value streams, fifty-one teams, and every dependency between them. Finding the dependencies and risks while they were still cheap tripled throughput and cut lag and errors by more than seventy percent. Then I moved the development managers, business analysts and product managers off status reporting and work assignment, and onto strategic priorities, cross-functional relationships, and developing their own teams. That was agile. It is the same migration AI is about to ask of you.
The model worked. It scored churn risk accurately, and it was interesting information collecting dust on a shelf. I built what turns a score into an action: the workflows, the enablement, the training. Who looks at it, when, and what they do about it. The regions started acting on the outputs weekly. Then it went into performance plans and quotas, which is the point where a model stops being a report and becomes how the company works.
The strategy was sound and the team was capable. The same three decisions came back to the table every month and nobody made them, because the disagreement underneath had never been said out loud. The work surfaced it, named who owned which call, and the decisions got made. Two of them went the way nobody expected.
The ways to work together
Five ways in.
Most start with the Blueprint. Some already know what they need.
High-level read · free
The Read
Free
Five minutes
A high-level read. Ten questions, five minutes. The same ones I ask in the first hour: what you are solving for, why those use cases, and whether the data is guiding the decision or ratifying one already made.
You leave with
One of five patterns named, and the first question to ask.
You get one of five patterns: the Wrong Problem, the Inherited Promise, the Ratified Decision, the Disconnected Plan, or the Crowded Roadmap. The full read comes by email: what the pattern means, why it happens, and what usually happens next. No call, no obligation.
Leadership development · one day
The Room
$10,000
One day · up to 12 people
A working session that gets your leadership team clear together: what you are solving for, what you promised, which use cases matter, and where you are quietly disagreeing about all three.
You leave with
One version of the answer, held by everyone who has to deliver it.
Half day or full day, on site or remote. Empathy interviews beforehand, so the day is built around your team rather than a template and I arrive already knowing where the disagreement sits. We work on decision rights, what is not being said, and the shared language that makes the plan hold. This is the method I have used for twenty years, run live with your people.
The core engagement
Strategic clarity · diagnostic
The Blueprint
$25,000–$35,000
Focused diagnostic
Empathy interviews across the levels, so the company tells you what it already knows. The real opportunity beneath the surface story, and what it will take to deliver it.
You leave with
A plan your team can run, and the confidence to promise it.
Empathy interviews at every level, a clear look at the data and the decision rights, and the conversations people have been avoiding. Nobody tells a survey the truth. You get the real opportunity named, what it will take to deliver it, and a sequence. Whether you build it with me or not.
Change management · implementation
The Realignment
From $75,000
Phased, scoped
Advisory-led implementation. Your team does the work. I hold the through-line: sequencing, decision rights, and the change management at every gate. Phased and scoped, with a clear definition of done at each one.
You leave with
An operating rhythm your team runs without me, because they built it.
Phased and gated. Each phase has a definition of done and a decision point, so you can stop at any gate. This is the work that turns a model into something people act on weekly: the workflows, the enablement, the training, and who owns what. I work through your team rather than around it, which is why it still runs when I leave.
The founding cohort
The Human Layer.
A cohort of six to eight senior leaders, each running something nobody in their company has run before. Ten weeks on the work that decides whether it delivers: asking the right questions, building the plan that connects, and operationalizing it so it holds. You bring the transformation you are actually running.
Every other way of working with me delivers my thinking to you. This one leaves you able to do it yourself, with a handful of people you can call when it gets hard.
Founding cohort · March 2027
$7,500
Founding seat · $12,000 standard
Ten weeks. Six to eight seats. Applications close mid-February and every one is read personally. Director level and above.
Not ready to talk to anyone?
Start with a read.
No call, no calendar, no name attached to anything. The Read takes five minutes, tells you which of five patterns your company is actually in, and sends you the full read by email.
No call required
The Read
Five patterns: the Wrong Problem, the Inherited Promise, the Ratified Decision, the Disconnected Plan, the Crowded Roadmap. Ten questions, five minutes, and a named pattern rather than a score.
Make the strategy hold.
A short, free conversation about what you are trying to deliver, and whether I am the right person to help.
Free, 15 minutes, no pitch.
Free 15-minute Clarity Call. No pitch.
Book now