Everything feels urgent. Most of it matters. That is the problem.

CEOs and their senior teams work with me to get clear on what matters, and to lead effectively inside the pressure that never lets up.
Fewer. Better. Clearer.
Harvard Business Review
HBR's 10 Must Reads on High Performance
Operator first, advisor since: employee #104 at Compaq, then more than two decades coaching executives at inflection points

Featured Publication

3 Questions to Pressure-Test Your Priorities

Harvard Business Review, July 2026

Every request on your calendar is legitimate. That is what makes prioritizing so hard now, and why the old tools stopped working. This piece offers three tests for deciding what is undeniable when everything is important.

My work usually begins at the top: coaching the CEO and working with the executive team to be more effective through hypergrowth and transition. As the company grows, the work grows with it, developing the next generation of leaders so there is someone ready to take on what the senior team needs to shed. The engagement evolves the way the company does.

Executive Coaching

For CEOs and senior leaders whose situation is outrunning the playbook.

Senior Team Effectiveness

Teams that must form fast and work well. Without this, everything else fails.

Leadership Development

The next generation who must catch what the top team sheds, so the top team can take on what the transition demands.

Recent engagements include PE-backed SaaS and technology companies from $50M to $1B+ in revenue.

95%+ of clients return for additional engagements and/or refer new leaders.

“Karen’s calm isn’t passive; it’s what pulls the conversation out of a team. Most facilitators take the oxygen in the room. Karen hands it back. She set the conditions for our best thinking and then got out of the way.”

Irina Novoselsky, CEO, Hootsuite

I have known Karen as my coach and my colleague across more than two decades and several companies, through IPOs, exits, and the hardest stretches of growth. She is the advisor I bring into companies where I serve on boards, because she makes senior teams better and tells the truth while doing it. That is how she becomes a trusted partner rather than a vendor.

Kathleen Miller, board director and audit chair at multiple software companies

The leaders I work with are not short on capability. They are operating in a condition I write about often: always-on pressure that makes everything feel urgent, because most of it genuinely is. The AI transition is accelerating it. The work is deciding clearly inside it.

The work starts with a conversation

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