Courageous Transformation for Good

Oxford Leadership’s Next Chapter: Guiding Courageous Transformation for Good

You already know that transformation in your organization isn’t working the way it should.

Not because the strategy is wrong. Or because the intent is disingenious. But because organisations, even great ones led by capable people, consistently underestimate the inner work required to make external changes stick.

Most common derailers: Lack of shared purpose. Culture problems. Courage deficits. And the gap between what leaders commit to in the boardroom and what actually happens three levels down.

As you probably know that gap is expensive. It costs organisations years of talent and time.

This is precisely the gap Oxford Leadership has spent more than 20 years learning how to close, across many industries and in every continent. We’ve guided leaders in conditions ranging from post-crisis recovery to long-cycle reinvention to navigating the frequency of disruption that makes strategy documents obsolete before the ink dries.

We are announcing our next chapter. But before we get to structure, team and frameworks of our future, we want to share what we have learned over the years, what we believe is changing, and how we can win, together.

What we have learned

Most leadership development does not lead to organisation transformation. It develops individual leaders, which matters, but it does not guarantee a change in the system, the culture, or the execution environment. Leaders often return from programmes energised, but then collide, repeatedly, with the same structural and cultural forces that were there before they left.

Genuine, systemic transformation requires something different. It requires the organisation, not just its leaders, to change. It requires courage listed not just as a value on a wall, but as a daily intentional practice, tested in rooms where difficult decisions are made. And it requires discipline to connect purpose to performance so that transformation is not an aspiration but a measurable result.

What is changing

The context our clients are operating in has shifted faster than most organisations have adapted to. Shifting customer needs, changes in global markets, and activist pressure. Regulatory acceleration. Speed and pace of technology. And AI rewriting how decisions get made, and by whom.

Leaders are being asked to deliver results today while at the same time fundamentally redesigning and innovating how their organisations will work tomorrow. These are not sequential pressures that can be managed one at a time. They arrive simultaneously, requiring leadership that can confidently navigate complexity without collapsing into false certainty.

What we are doing to meet the challenge

Oxford Leadership is evolving to continue to predict, meet, and exceed the needs of our incredible clients.

Building on 20 years of ground-breaking impact with global leaders—from Fortune 500 CEOs and heads of state to founders building organizations worth standing behind—and through pioneering, industry-defining programs (Self-Managing Leadership®, MASTER Code®, and LHPT®), we have inspired more than 1 million people to discover and develop their life’s purpose.

Today, we are thrilled to announce the next chapter: expanding our capability through the integration of Be Courageous, an award-winning transformation agency based in San Francisco.

Be Courageous brings a decade of science-backed and real-time-tested courageous transformation, leadership, and AI-era innovation practices, programs and resources into our Oxford Leadership universe.

Where Oxford Leadership’s methodologies provide the inner architecture of how leaders think, decide, commit and act, Be Courageous bridges the inner work (shifting state, behaviors and results from fear to courage) to accelerate the outer work: innovation, culture change, customer experience, experimentation at scale, and technology-enabled decision-making.

Together, we now create purpose led transformation that works from the inside out and the outside in, simultaneously.

For clients, this resolves a problem that has frustrated good transformation work for years: Leadership capability is built, but the organisation doesn’t move. Or the organisation is restructured, but the leadership culture doesn’t catch up.

We can now address both in concert.

A strengthened leadership team

Kyle Hermans, CEO and Founder of Be Courageous, leads global growth. With his trademark energy and ability to unlock the unknown, Kyle brings clients the ultimate in courageous transformation leadership expertise, which has defined his work across industries and continents.

Jenna Hermans, CFO, brings the financial discipline required to build an organisation whose own growth reflects the standards we hold our clients to.

Jonathan Yukawa, Managing Director, responsible for Digital, Brand & Marketing, ensures that what we have built reaches leaders who need it, in the forms and channels where they are.

Supported by

Brian Bacon, Chairman & Founder, stewarding purpose, mentoring senior leaders and boards, and holding the long view vision on what this work is for.

The transformation partners

What distinguishes Oxford Leadership is the combination of the rigour of our methodologies, the strength and experience of our leadership team, and the high calibre of our partners who deliver this important work globally:

Michal Oshman: Former Global Head of Company Culture at TikTok and International Leadership Development Executive at Facebook (Meta). Michal is one of the most credible culture architects working in the field today. A TEDx speaker and bestselling author of What Would You Do If You Weren’t Afraid?, she brings hard-won insight from the world’s most scrutinised organisations into every client engagement.

Paul Roberts: Partner, and Singularity University Exponential Innovation Expert. Paul helps organisations see the future and find their place in it. He has delivered over 260 talks and 80 programmes to global executive audiences on exponential technologies, digital transformation, platform economics, and the leadership required to navigate continuous change. A trained economist and former IHS Global Insights analyst, he brings rare analytical rigour to a question most transformation work avoids: not just how to change, but what the world you are changing into will look like when you get there.

Katie Jackson: Partner, Transformational Leadership Advisor, and Organizational Strategist. Katie has over 17 years guiding leaders and teams through growth, change, and reinvention. Her background spans top-tier consulting at McKinsey, EY, and IBM, and in-house leadership at the high-growth biotech company Insitro. She’s known for bringing clarity, compassion, and structure to complex business challenges. Katie balances heart and backbone, vision, and groundedness—helping leaders come alive and lead from their deepest brilliance.

Greg Orme: Award-winning author of The Human Edge—named Business Book of the Year 2020, and founding CEO of London Business School’s Centre for Creative Business. Greg works with senior leaders and executive teams at the intersection of human judgment, organisational creativity and AI-era decision-making, with clients including BMW, Microsoft, Sky, Novo Nordisk, Arup, and the World Economic Forum.

Derek Platt, MA, MBA (戴磊坤) is a seasoned Global Leadership and Talent Development Consultant and Executive Coach with an ability to bridge rigorous strategic analysis with the deeply human dimensions of organizational change. Based in Edmonds, Washington, Derek brings extensive cross-cultural expertise to his work, including years of Mandarin language study and lived experience across the Asia Pacific region . A graduate of the Thunderbird/Garvin School of International Management. His work at Oxford Leadership reflects a fundamental belief that global mindset is a leadership imperative.

Shuntian Yao is the Asia Pacific Program Director at Oxford Leadership. A 20 years veteran of the company, Shuntian brings a uniquely bicultural perspective to leadership development across the Asia Pacific region. A Chinese/English bilingual, Shuntian holds a Master of Science from Harvard University and has built a distinguished career at the intersection of executive coaching, organizational development, and conflict resolution. Based in Beijing, Shuntian’s work is grounded in the belief that genuine transformation begins within the leader, making her a natural and powerful voice within the Oxford Leadership community. 

Introducing Oxford Leadership’s four pillars of transformation

Our next chapter is built around four transformation domains that map directly onto the pressures boards and executive teams are grappling with now.

Purpose: Knowing Yourself. Aligning your organization around what truly matters. Most organizations get stuck in the gap between purpose as surface-level brand language and purpose as a daily filter for decision-making.

Courage: Creating Your Future. Unlocking critical decisions that have been avoided, conversations that have been deferred, and the changes that have stalled, not from lack of strategy, but from lack of nerve. This is the work most other consultancies leave to the client.

Intelligence: Building symbiotic relationships between humans and technology. Creating the capacity to think clearly, and humanly, and what it means to lead with judgment, not just data, as AI reshapes the cognitive and decision landscape of every organisation.

Performance: Making results real, now. Closing the gap between transformation as intention and transformation as result. Measurable. Tied to leadership behaviour, culture and where the execution is felt in the business, quarter by quarter.

These four domains are the lenses through which we help leaders diagnose what matters, align around what is needed, and move from development to meaningful transformation that allows organizations to perform and reinvent at the same time.

What comes next

As your world is changing, we are here, prepared, and will stay ahead of the change with you. Our next chapter begins, together.

We will continue to share insights, thinking, and practical entry points for organisations to transform. That includes the introduction of our Transformation Readiness Diagnostic, designed to help you get an outside-in view and assessment of the courage, leadership, culture, and execution conditions needed for your transformation to succeed.

Reach out, we look forward to speaking with you.