I'm Nigel Williams, founder of EMCS. I'm 61, and I've spent thirty years in complex, demanding change delivery, management and leadership situations: as Client Partner with global change leadership and stakeholder management accountability for major transformation programmes at BP and Shell with IBM and BearingPoint; as an Associate Director in large-scale change at PwC; and since 2016 as an independent working alongside PE-backed leadership teams. I could just about retire. I have no intention of doing so — not because I need the work, but because the work still genuinely interests me — especially in the PE mid-cap domain, where I've now deliberately chosen to focus. When a leadership team is under real pressure and something starts to move, that still matters, and matters a lot.
I’m not the detached, measured Big 4 partner type. I engage with commitment and, frankly, passion. I think and act as part of the leadership team I’m supporting, not as an external resource maintaining professional distance. The problems matter to me. The people matter to me.
I won't tell someone what they want to hear to win favour. I've walked away from engagements where the fit wasn't right. I'd do it again without hesitation.
What thirty years of this work in change also teaches you — if you’re honest about it — is that no single person covers all the ground well. People have sweet spots.
Early in my career the then standard 360-degree appraisal exercises focused on weaknesses and what to do about them. A stint as European VP for a small but NASDAQ-listed business with Michael Porter and Philip Kotler on its board reframed that instinct for good. The Porter-based principle that stuck: play to your strengths, find people whose strengths sit where yours don't, and work together mutually, not to paper over gaps, but because the combination creates something neither of you would reach alone.
I know my shape. I know where I’m strong and where I’m not. The EMCS model exists because I’d rather collaborate around that honestly than pretend otherwise.
Which means the people I work with matter easily as much as I do. They represent the trusted inner core of EMCS not just colleagues on engagements, but the kind of people I’d want on my side of the table, or pick up the phone to when I needed an honest view.
Let me name two — as examples of that type, and because they’ve been particularly helpful, hands-on and central in getting EMCS to where it is today.
Graham Murray brings a career that sits at the intersection of change delivery and executive IT leadership — he’s held Head of IT roles with full accountability for service delivery, development, IT strategy and programme budget. The actual job, not a consultancy approximation of it. He built on that over 30 years as an independent, leading major transformation and programme recovery work across financial services, pharmaceutical and manufacturing environments, with deep SAP and technology programme expertise. His pattern recognition challenges mine from a different angle — the angle of someone who has both run the technology function and led the delivery. He does it without politics or positioning. He’s in from the first conversation on every engagement.
Richard Newton has 35 years of delivery and change experience through Enixus, much of it, in his own words, sorting out messy programmes and transformations. He’s a triple award-winning author of 16 non-fiction books now in 17 languages, including the Management Book of the Year in 2013, built on an earlier career spanning Coopers & Lybrand, AT Kearney and Cap Gemini Ernst & Young. Most recently he led a £100m+ multi-year transformation as Director of Major Programmes at British Gas, reporting directly to the MD. He challenges the framing at the point where it most needs to be challenged — early, before positions harden — and with the precision of someone who has both done this work at scale and written about it more carefully than most.
The EMCS core have worked together long enough that ways of working are pre-baked. We don’t waste time finding our feet. We don’t fight for intellectual turf. What you get is thinking tested from multiple angles before it reaches you, and a model that is materially stronger than any one of us operating alone.
The core is always expanding: currently eight active executive change leadership practitioners, each with their own distinctive sweet spot.
That’s not a statement about what we can offer. It’s a description of how we work — and why we chose to.
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