Everything still runs through you

Constraint

Under a global corporate transaction, FIMAL's European parent was acquired by BNP Paribas. With $4.3B in local assets under management across individually managed accounts, the APAC restructure carried extremely complex and sensitive strategic and operational stakes, and two earlier attempts to lead the integration had already failed before Stuart was called in.

Intervention

Brought in as the fixer after two prior attempts had stalled, Stuart took over the restructure and led the APAC region integration program end-to-end through the M&A, resolving leadership and operating-structure issues across the newly combined organisation on multiple fronts simultaneously, not the single workstream that had failed twice before.

Constraint

Change kept living in the PMO instead of the business, this wasn't the first attempt: new processes and systems had already been rolled out more than once without sticking, adoption stalling below 60% each time, with every relaunch meaning the same work redone from scratch.

Intervention

Rather than run a fourth identical rollout, installed a common leadership language and toolset owned by the leaders themselves, not the program office, fixing the ownership problem, the process problem, and the habit problem together.

Constraint

Rapid hiring had roughly doubled headcount inside eighteen months, and the culture hadn't kept pace, what got rewarded in practice (speed, individual heroics) quietly contradicted what leadership said mattered (collaboration, sustainable pace). Regretted attrition was climbing fastest in the teams the business could least afford to lose, and exit conversations kept naming the same gap: what was said and what was actually lived didn't match.

Intervention

Activated a cultural reinforcement system rather than another values poster, translated the stated values into specific, observable behaviours, built them directly into how every manager ran recognition and performance conversations, and made the gap between what the organisation said it valued and what it actually rewarded visible and correctable in real time.

Constraint

A multi-region digital transformation was already stalling by the time Stuart stepped in, each country ran its own version of the operating model, wide variance in performance, and rising local resistance to change, after an earlier transformation cycle had failed to land.

Intervention

Took over a program that had already burned one cycle and installed a single execution rhythm across every country at once, decision rights, meeting cadence, and accountability loops fixed together rather than one country at a time, coaching local leaders to run it themselves instead of waiting on direction from HQ.