EXECUTIVE AND LEADERSHIP COACH WITH THIRTY YEARS IN ENGINEERING
I work with senior technical leaders who want to lead more deliberately
Most of what you carry, you never chose to pick up.
Bring the heaviest thing on your plate. Spend twenty minutes on it, and you'll have a clearer read on what to pick up and what to put down.
At no cost.
I designed data storage systems for 30 years, the kind that have to keep running when one part of them fails. I was the person they brought the hard problem to. I sit on the other side of the table now, and the problems are less technical than they look.
David Perry
Coaching since 2016 / One to one / Zürich or remote / English
RECOGNITION
Nothing is wrong. That is the confusing part.
Your calendar is full, and most of it is legitimate. The people around you are capable. The numbers are defensible. You are still the one everyone brings the hard decision to, and still the one who closes it.
At the end of the day, you can account, precisely, for what did not get done. What you handled well does not get the same accounting. It registers as the baseline, and goes unremarked, including by you.
This is not a capacity problem. More effort has stopped paying, because effort was never the constraint. The weight is not in how much you carry. It is in how little of it you chose.
So the first question is not how to carry it better. It is what you would put down, if putting it down were yours to decide.
WHAT CHANGES
The load does not get lighter.You get steadier.
The work does not remove what you are carrying. It changes who is carrying it.
Doing is what you produce. Being is who is producing it. Every leader carries a way of being they did not choose: it was assembled under pressure, it worked, and it is part of why you were promoted. Ontological coaching makes it visible, and then makes it optional. It shows up in three observable places, which are the language you use, the moods you operate from, and how you hold yourself when the pressure arrives.
For 30 years, I designed systems that had to keep running when one part of them failed. A leader is not different in that respect.
WHY DAVID
I have sat in the pressure you are describing
30 years in data storage, most of it in Silicon Valley and then Zürich. Pioneering work on early RAID systems, first in class and fully fault-tolerant. Then the internal algorithms and failover architecture for the generation after that, and later the management of storage systems and fibre channel networks.
I know what it means to be on the technological edge, to ship against a deadline that was never realistic, and to be the person in the room who says it will be fine.
I moved into coaching in 2016, trained as an ontological coach with Ontoco and the Newfield Institute, and I have taught mindfulness meditation.
The engineering did not go away. It shows up as precision in what is actually happening, and impatience with anything that sounds good but does not hold up.
I work with leaders one to one in Zürich and remotely, and I run several workshops a year.
Some of this work happens in workshops, with a small group. Most of it happens inside an ordinary week, which is where it has to hold.
WAYS TO WORK TOGETHER
Where would you rather start?
Two shapes of the same work. A single day, or six months. Each is complete in itself, and neither is a step towards the other.
Vista View
A full day, one to one, built around the thing that will not resolve. A decision, a transition, a role that has stopped fitting. You leave with it named, tested against what actually matters, and a first move you have committed to out loud.
- Shape
- One day, live
- Suits
- One decision with a date on it
Steady State
Twelve 60-minute sessions, two weeks apart, opening with three hours of Essence Discovery. The gap between sessions is where the work is tested. For the pattern that returns whatever decision is in front of you.
- Shape
- 12 sessions plus three hours
- Suits
- A pattern, not a single call
proof
What clients say they are done with
At the end of an engagement, I ask the same question every time: what old behaviors, thoughts, patterns, and feelings are you done with? These are their answers across nine years of asking that question. The repetition is the point.
Nobody arrives asking for this. They arrive with a decision, a role that has stopped fitting, or a quarter that went well and did not feel like it. The list above is what turns out to have been in the way.
It takes two things: a session to see clearly, and the two weeks after it to find out whether you were right.
THE FIRST LOOK
One conversation. Then you decide.
20 minutes, at no cost. We look at what you are actually carrying, and at the gap between the effort going in and what is coming back.
Length
20 Minutes
Cost
None
None. No proposal follows unless you ask for one.
Obligation
If coaching is not the right answer, I will say so, and where possible I will point you at what is.