Why I joined Russell Reynolds Associates

For the past 30 years, I have worked with CEOs in support of their leadership, team, and organizational development efforts. I spent my first seven years in the field working with Professor Noel Tichy , who introduced me to a wonderful group of mentors—a generation of academics and consultants who helped corporate giants of the 1980s and 90s adapt to a more competitive, global marketplace. Since 2000, I have founded and run two successful consulting firms dedicated to partnering with CEOs and their leadership teams as they transformed complex organizations.

Today I’m excited to share the news of my next professional chapter: The Nvolv team is joining Russell Reynolds Associates (RRA).

Given how busy I’ll be over the next few months managing client work and integrating Nvolv into RRA, it will be difficult to speak directly with all my current and former clients, colleagues, and friends to explain how I came to this decision.?So for those interested, I’d like to share the journey I’ve been on and how I arrived at this moment. The story revolves around two questions: First, after being my own boss for decades, why would I join any firm? Second, why RRA?

Go Big Elsewhere

Every five years since I left college in 1987, I’ve invested time to reflect and draft a five-year career plan. I ask myself a consistent series of questions:

• What impact do I want to have on the world?
• What do I want to learn?
• What kind of work do I want to do?
• What are my savings goals to help secure my family’s financial future?

Armed with my answers, I spent the first three months of 2022 contemplating the various ways I could achieve my intentions while considering new approaches to doing my work. This time around, I couldn’t escape the reality of time. I’m 57 years old—I probably don’t have many more of these five-year plans left in me. With the watch of Damocles over my head, I realized that I was driven by the idea of leaving it all out on the field before my career sunsets.?

Nvolv was founded with a Jerry Maguire business model: “Fewer clients, less money.” We focus on a few clients at a time, working with leaders we respect and organizations that we care about. We stay actively engaged with most clients for years, building meaningful relationships and helping people across the enterprise to elevate, develop, and align while establishing an effective leadership architecture for the organization.?

The work Nvolv is doing now is the best of my career—our client partnerships are having a dramatic impact, helping complex businesses transform and align their people and organizations.?

As I walked the perimeter of my options, I became animated by the idea of wanting to have a bigger impact, to be able to scale what we do to support more leaders and businesses. I considered growing Nvolv beyond our relatively small team, but I know from experience that building a large consulting firm on one’s own poses significant financial risks. At my stage of life, that doesn’t seem wise.?

So, to achieve my ambition to have a greater impact on the world, the choice was to “go big elsewhere.”?

It quickly became clear that there was a strategic fit with leadership advisory firms that excel at CEO succession. Our approach to leadership, team, and organizational development is especially effective with CEOs at the start of their tenures. After learning more about the leadership advisory space and its top firms, I focused on RRA.?

In June 2022, I reached out to RRA’s CEO Constantine Alexandrakis (someone I’ve known casually for 20 years), and we’ve been exploring the possibilities ever since. By the end of the year, I had decided to sell Nvolv to RRA.?

“Tell me with whom you consort and I will tell you who you are: If I know how you spend your time, then I know what might become of you.” ―???Johann Wolfgang von?Goethe?

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Why RRA

“To Improve the Way the World is Led” is the stated purpose of RRA. That is as clear an articulation of the animating force of my career as anything I’ve ever heard or said myself. In meeting people from across RRA, it’s clear to me that this purpose resonates deeply—and there is a real fit between our firms.?

Improving the Way the World is Led feels more urgent than ever as our nations and organizations show the strains of an increasing rate of change. Humanity is living through a period in which we will experience serious disruption to familiar patterns in shorter cycles as information technology, biotechnology, global warming, and demographics rapidly evolve.?

Leadership is the engine of intentional adaptation and we need all the effective executives we can get for society to flourish. My mission is to help the practice of leadership evolve to meet the moment and support as many executive leaders as possible as they adapt themselves and their organizations to changing conditions.

First and foremost, Nvolv landed at RRA because of that fit in purpose.?

Fortunately, there is also a culture fit. The people we’ve gotten to know at RRA are heart-centered human beings who show up without pretense. They are smart and work hard to have a virtuous impact on the world. They like to learn, win, and help others. They collaborate easily. Just like my colleagues at Nvolv.

There is a fit in strategy, too.?RRA is evolving its work and approach to clients, moving away from the transactional traditions of the search industry towards deeper, more meaningful relationships in which they provide advice and support to CEOs, C-suite executives, and boards over the long term.?They are rapidly growing their coaching, assessment, and development capabilities.?And they’re being intentional and strategic as they do it.??

Nvolv fits perfectly within this strategy. We bring proven and powerful expertise in Leadership, Team, and Organizational Development, decades of experience working with CEOs and their executive teams, and a client relationship architecture that is unique in the industry. As Nvolv integrates into RRA, I look forward to creating together something significant that doesn’t yet exist in the marketplace, all in service of our clients.?

So as of today, Nvolv and I are part of the RRA team. We look forward to scaling our capacity and expanding our capabilities as we continue to partner with CEOs and their executive teams. Together we will work even harder to improve the way the world is led.

Bob Marcus

June 13, 2023

[email protected]