Before this
Close to two decades in senior and board-level seats, across the US, Brazil, Asia and Europe. The roles are listed further down, under The operating years.
I did the job first. Then I changed what the job was.
Menno Dellisse
Growth mentor, board member and speaker.
- Based
- Brussels, working globally
- Before GRWR
- UBS, Mastercard, Le Pain Quotidien
- Teaching
- HEC Paris, NYU Stern, TRIUM EMBA
- Languages
- English, French, Dutch
In my own words.
How I got here, and why the work looks the way it does.
What changed
Somewhere in the middle of all that, the part I actually cared about stopped being the transaction and became the person carrying it. The CEO who could not say the thing out loud in their own building. The founder whose company had quietly outgrown the way they were leading it. The board that had agreed on something several people in the room privately doubted.
That conversation kept being the one that mattered, and it was rarely on the agenda.
Why GRWR
I made that conversation the work. A small number of CEOs, founders, executive committees and boards at a time, and a private space to think clearly about strategy, growth, governance, culture and the numbers, in one conversation rather than five.
The person, then the plan
The work runs on two tracks at once: the company, and the person running it. The beliefs they operate from, often formed years ago for an earlier version of themselves and of the company. Some of them have to be left behind before the next stage of growth is possible. The habits that got them here and now get in the way. The decisions they keep postponing, and how they carry the weight on a bad day.
I am not a therapist, and the tools are different: direct questions, frameworks built on your case, and routines you keep between sessions. A lot of it is putting words on what has been running in the background. Sometimes that means digging down to where a belief came from. Then we rewrite it for the company and life you are building now.
Why I sit on boards
Because the seat keeps the advice honest. It is easy to have a view on a decision you never have to sign off on.
And because it shows me the company from where the capital sits, not only from where the CEO sits. The two rarely share a horizon. A CEO is often judged on this year. A board has to answer for the next five or ten. A good part of my mentoring work happens in that gap.
The operating years.
The jobs I held before GRWR, most recent first. The boards I sit on now are on the Recent work page.
2016 to 2018
Le Pain Quotidien
Chief Strategy, Marketing and Growth Officer
2013 to 2016
Mastercard
Group General Manager, Enterprise Partnerships and Global Strategic Alliances
2009 to 2012
UBS Belgium
CFO and COO, member of the Board
2007 to 2009
Chief of Staff, Head of Business Management
- 2010 to 2012FebelfinMember of the Board of the Belgian Banking Federation
- 2005 to 2007Sip-Well GermanyGeneral Manager · Restructured it through its acquisition by Danone
What I keep coming back to.
The convictions that shape how I advise, whoever sits across the table.
- Steady is not the same as safe.
- A company that adds a percent to last year, every year, is making a decision too. It just doesn’t say so.
- Growth has to be believed in.
- Growth compounds when the people carrying the decisions actually believe in them. Without that, it is just volume.
- Say the thing.
- The most useful sentence in a board meeting is usually the one no one has said yet. My job is to say it, with the numbers behind it. Having someone’s back sometimes means telling them what others won’t.
- In a family company, governance is family.
- Every governance question is also a family question, whether it is siblings who own the company together but weigh risk and reward differently, a generation taking over, or the company changing hands. I treat them as one conversation.
Back to school, then to the front of the class.
I did the TRIUM Global Executive MBA, run jointly by NYU Stern, LSE and HEC Paris, and graduated magna cum laude with a degree from each of the three. Since then I have taught on the programme and sat on its thesis defence juries, and have been invited separately to lecture at HEC Paris and NYU Stern. I also co-wrote a case on UBS’s global strategy with Pierre Dussauge, then Dean of Faculty and Research at HEC Paris.
One thing outside work has shaped how I work more than anything else.
I race long-course triathlon: the half and full Ironman distances, 70.3 and 140.6 miles. The race is the visible part. What decides it happens months before, in sessions no one else sees, most of them uncomfortable, and in hundreds of small choices about what to train, what to skip and when to rest. On the day, the one who blows up is usually the one who ignored the plan in the first hour.
Companies work the same way. By the time a result shows, the decisions behind it were made long ago. That is where most of my work with a CEO happens.
Let’s talk.
Tell me where the company stands and what’s on your mind. A few lines are enough to start. I read every message myself, and I answer personally.
- menno@grwr.co
- Menno Dellisse
- Location
- Based in Brussels · Working globally