ADVISORY SERVICES
Advisory
Confidential, tailored work with boards, family businesses and organizations.
Opening
The chairmen and directors who call me already know, almost always, that something is not working on their board. Last year’s self-assessment came out fine and no one believes the results. The audit committee debates for hours without reaching a conclusion. The CEO privately complains that the board meddles where it shouldn’t. The CFO doesn’t understand why the independents are so passive. The chairman succession has been postponed for the sixth time. The signals are different, but the underlying diagnosis is usually the same: the invisible architectures of that room have fallen out of sync and no one is reading them.
What I do is not write a report to teach best practices — those circulate in abundance and rarely change anything. What I do is enter the room with the combination of three decades as an academic, advisor and director, read the specific architectures of that board, give the chairman and the committee an honest reading of what I saw, and accompany — when appropriate — the redesign that follows from that reading. It is slow and discreet. Façade self-assessments end in a PowerPoint presentation. This work ends in boards that see themselves with more honesty and make different decisions.
What I Do
Engagements vary, but most fall into one of these seven lines.
Substantive Board Self-Assessment
A six-to-eight-week process that combines individual confidential interviews with each director, observation of at least one full session, analysis of board packages and minutes from the past twelve months, and a report that goes first to the chairman and then to the full board. It is not the fourteen-question survey everyone signs before the cocktail reception. It is the conversation the board has not been able to have with itself, led by someone who is not competing for anyone’s seat.
Redesign of Information Architecture and Agendas
What enters the room, what gets filtered, what arrives late. How much time is spent supervising the past versus anticipating the future. Design of a new director package, the annual calendar of topics, the areas of focus. This is also where the real use of artificial intelligence on board work has the greatest impact.
Redesign of Committees and Mandates
Composition, scope, dynamics between committees, recurring friction between Audit and Risk or between Sustainability and Strategy. Which ones work, which are ornamental, and which are doing work that belongs to the full board.
Accompaniment of the Board Chairman
Individual and confidential work. Reading of their leadership style, the dynamics they generate, the silences they produce. How they prepare sessions, how they close debates, how they manage the CEO. No personal agenda; no competition for the spotlight.
Onboarding of New Directors
Not the tour of presentations. The real process of understanding the culture of that room, its unwritten norms, its coalitions and its areas of tension. How to add value from the first year without breaking what works.
Design or Redesign of the CEO Succession Process
Who decides, with what criteria, on what timeline, with what level of transparency toward internal candidates. This is one of the areas where the gap between what the board believes it is doing and what is actually happening tends to be the largest.
Governance Crisis Diagnosis
When something broke — between the board and the CEO, within the board, between the board and shareholders — and the question is not just what happened but how to rebuild the trust and the architecture that sustains it.
How I Work
I have no team. I work alone. The person the chairman speaks with in the first conversation is the same one who enters the room, conducts the interviews, writes the report, and leads the difficult conversations. There are no juniors taking notes or partners who appear at the end to take credit.
Engagements are confidential by design. I do not publish cases, do not mention clients, do not use one board as a reference to another. Discretion is not a policy — it is the condition that makes the work possible.
I operate primarily in Chile, Peru, Colombia, Mexico and Argentina, though I have worked with boards in other countries in the region and in Spain.
Illustrative Cases
A retail company board faced chronic tension between the chairman — the company’s founder — and three independent directors who felt their opinions arrived too late and were ignored. The work began with individual interviews that revealed the problem was not about people but about architecture: the chairman was preparing sessions with the CFO and arrived with decisions already made. We redesigned the preparation process, incorporated a prior independent directors session with direct information, and worked with the chairman on his leadership style. The tension did not disappear, but it became productive.
A third-generation family business with seven directors — four family members, three independents — had been unable to advance on the dividend policy for two years. The diagnosis showed that the real problem was a confusion of roles between the board and the shareholders’ assembly, combined with a session agenda that mixed corporate governance with operational management. We separated the spaces, redesigned the agenda, and facilitated the conversations the family had not been able to have. The dividend policy was approved four months later.
Shall we talk?
If something you read resonates with what you are experiencing on your board, the first step is a conversation. No commitment, no proposal, no presentation. Just a conversation.
Opening
Family businesses have a complexity that publicly traded companies do not: the same person can simultaneously be shareholder, director, executive and family member. These overlaps are not a problem to be eliminated — they are the nature of the model. The problem arises when no one designs them consciously and when the spaces for each role are not well defined.
I have worked with business families in different countries in Latin America for nearly three decades — as an advisor, as a director, and as an academic who studies these systems. What I offer is not generic family protocol recipes. It is the ability to read the specific architecture of each family and business, identify where the real tension lies, and accompany the design of structures that allow that family to govern well what they built.
What I Do
Design and Redesign of the Family Council
Who participates, with what mandate, how it relates to the board and to management. When it meets, which topics belong to it and which do not. A well-designed family council is the space where the family makes decisions as owners, not as employees or a dispute tribunal.
Family Protocol
Not the hundred-page document that ends up in a drawer. The collective construction process for agreements on the topics that generate the most tension: family employment policy, dividends, succession, entry of outside capital, non-negotiable values. The value is not in the document — it is in the conversation that produces it.
Separation of Spaces: Family, Board, Management
Diagnosis of where roles overlap and what consequences that overlap has. Design of forums, agendas, and protocols that allow each space to function with its own appropriate logic. This is one of the highest-impact engagements in second and third-generation companies.
Accompaniment in Succession Processes
Succession in ownership, in governance, and in management — three distinct processes that are frequently confused. Who decides, with what criteria, on what timeline, with what level of transparency toward those involved.
Governance Conflict Management
When tension between family branches, between generations, or between family and management has reached a point that blocks decisions. This is not therapeutic mediation — it is diagnosis of the architectures that generated the conflict and design of the structures that can contain it.
How I Work
Work with business families requires absolute confidentiality and a relationship of trust that is built slowly. I always begin with individual interviews with key members — not with a group presentation. What each person says in private is usually very different from what they say in the room, and that difference is the most valuable information.
I do not take sides with branches, generations, or factions. My only client is the system — the family and the business understood as a whole.
Shall we talk?
If you recognize any of these challenges in your family business, the first step is a confidential conversation. No commitment, no proposal, no presentation.
Opening
I have spent nearly thirty years speaking about corporate governance, boards, and family businesses — in classrooms, in boardrooms, and at conferences. The format varies, but the principle is the same: I do not come to confirm what the audience already knows. I come to show what is not being seen.
My talks draw on real cases, original research, and three decades of direct observation of how boards and family businesses in Latin America function — and fail. They are not PowerPoint presentations with conceptual frameworks. They are honest readings of phenomena that most people prefer not to name.
Topics
The Invisible Architectures of the Boardroom
Why boards with excellent directors make mediocre decisions. The real power, the information that circulates and the information that doesn’t, the dissent that gets anesthetized, the perspectives that are never represented. A reading of governance systems that goes beyond best practices.
Artificial Intelligence and Corporate Governance
What changes for boards when AI transforms available information, decision speed, and the nature of risk. Not a technology conference — a conference about how boards must rethink their oversight function and information architecture in a world with AI.
Family Business and Its Governance Traps
The recurring patterns that lead family businesses to predictable crises — and how families that recognize them in time can design structures to contain them. Based on original research and cases from Latin America, Europe, and the United States.
The Board Chairman: The Role Nobody Teaches
How to lead a room, how to prepare a session, how to manage the CEO without micromanaging, how to build the environment that allows directors to contribute the best they have. A topic that director education programs tend to ignore.
Succession: The Work Boards Don’t Do
Why CEO succession is the board’s most important responsibility and the one most poorly executed. The patterns of postponement, the undeclared conflicts of interest, the urgencies that displace what matters. And how it is done well.
Formats
Talks of 45 to 90 minutes for boards, executive committees, executive programs, director associations, and corporate events. Also half-day or full-day workshops for smaller working groups that want to go deeper on any of these topics.
I have spoken in Chile, Peru, Colombia, Mexico, Argentina, Spain, and other countries. Formats can be in-person or virtual.
Shall we talk?
If you are interested in any of these topics for your board, company, or event, write to me. We can talk about the format, the audience, and what would make most sense for your specific context.