The old binaries no longer describe the field. Tomorrow is less predictable than it was, and the choice between the first and second option is often no longer sufficient. There is usually a third.
I come from the north of Sweden. Cold country teaches what difficult markets teach: the terrain does not negotiate, and preparation is the whole of the work.
Based in Cape Town since 2012. Close to three decades in finance, investment, infrastructure, energy and security. Educated in the United States, career begun in New York in proprietary trading on the New York Stock Exchange, then private investment and cross-border execution.
My focus is people and the local environment. Strategy is rarely what fails; what fails is the ground it lands on — who decides, who is not in the room, what a regulator will accept, how things are actually done in a given place.
The first option is usually the internal team. The second is usually a large firm. I am normally the third — the one called when neither has been able to close the distance between a decision and the ground it has to land on.
The work is a bridge, and a quiet one: direct channels where they are needed, local requirements understood in advance, what is gathered reduced to something a board can act on. Where there is no bridge, I build it.