About

I’m David Haydon. After 20 years in senior executive roles across FTSE, ASX, and Private Equity-backed businesses, I now serve as a Non-Executive Director (including Audit Committee Chair) and strategic advisor to CEOs and boards.

I spent two decades in complex organisations – PE turnarounds, listed multinationals, high-growth businesses across retail, digital transformation, B2B/merchanting, professional services, and large-scale property management.

I’ve led transformations, navigated board dynamics, managed 12,000-strong teams, and made the strategic calls that deliver success.

Here’s what I learned: I’ve fired toxic high-performers who were making us money. I’ve vetoed projects my board loved. I’ve walked away from “strategic opportunities” that would have destroyed us. These weren’t popular decisions. They were necessary ones.

The hardest part of leadership isn’t moving fast. It’s knowing when to stop.

After concluding my executive tenure, I stepped back to study what I’d instinctively practiced for 20 years: strategic restraint as competitive advantage. That period of reflection – including deep study of philosophical principles around stillness and clarity – wasn’t escape. It was reclamation.

I’d lost myself in the noise too.

This combination – operational leadership at the highest level, plus disciplined focus on strategic restraint over reactive velocity – is what I bring to boardrooms and CEO partnerships today.

I create the conditions where difficult truths can surface without defensiveness. Where leaders can be honest about what they don’t know. Where strategic clarity emerges through dialogue rather than decree.

The work is rigorous, but it doesn’t feel heavy. Hard conversations happen, but they’re generative, not combative. Complexity becomes clear. Teams leave energized, not exhausted.

What keeps me in the room is the capacity to cut through noise, hold gravity and lightness in equal measure, and ask the questions that need to be asked.

My methodology combines two decades of C-suite experience with principles of strategic restraint to help boards and executives navigate high-stakes decisions with clarity and confidence.

This isn’t theory. It’s proven discipline forged in billion-pound operational environments where the margin for error was zero.

The frameworks I’ve developed – The Leadership Echo, The Strategic Lie of ‘Yes’, The Art of the 80% Decision, The Integrity Tax, Scale with Soul – are diagnostic tools that make invisible patterns visible. They help leaders see what proximity blinds them to.

But the frameworks are just tools. The real value is creating the clarity for leaders to make the decisions they already know are right.

I serve as a Non-Executive Director (including Audit Committee Chair) and maintain a selective advisory practice for CEOs navigating critical moments: transformation, PE exits, succession planning, or board dynamics.

I also write and speak on strategic restraint, governance, and leadership – building a thought leadership platform that challenges the “velocity culture” dominating executive decision-making today.

Available for board appointments and CEO partnerships.