Praxis & Prose

A strategy consultancy & coaching practice helping founders treat ADHD symptoms as design constraints.

I came up in agency land, working in big agencies and boutiques and later freelancing with the likes of Kering, DHL Discover, Ennismore Hotels, Slalom Consulting, De Beers, Nestlé, Fierce Inc, Ralph Lauren, & The Dorchester Collection.

My career has rewarded me for leaning into my curiosity, building relationships strong enough to influence change, and testing my assumptions. For more than 13 years I’ve gotten to work with smart, creative teams on interesting and challenging problems. Some of those challenges were technical and yielded to analysis, while others were creative, complex, and human. My penchant for asking questions above my paygrade has mostly served me well, while occasionally frustrating middle managers.

Eventually, I started advising founders directly, leveraging what I'd learned to help them with the tricky task of building a business that worked, and that worked for them.

It was about this time that I started to read the writing on the wall about my own brain, and dove deep on management strategies for ADHD. In turning my hyperfocus back on itself I was able to pry out new insight into my own ways of working, as well as those of many of my clients. I began to build informed, deliberate strategies and tools for improving how we're able to show up in our businesses.

Many entrepreneurs have at least a dash of ADHD. It's in the impulse to start the organisation in the first place, the relentless focus on solving a problem, and the satisfaction of autonomy and independence. It's also in the late nights, the inability to unplug or delegate, the unfinished projects, the looming deadlines, and the heroic 'last stands' that somehow keep happening. Unfortunately, the very traits that drive us to start can also drive us into the ground.

So I'm also a coach, helping founders to recognize misalignments between themselves and the organisation they're building, and understand the design constraints inherent in that interaction.

I don't see ADHD as a deficiency, but a set of tradeoffs. Strong strengths & strong weaknesses, as they say. The problems arise in the mismatch between our capabilities and what our environment asks of us.

Fortunately, as founders, we have more freedom than most to change the demands of our day to day environment, and to implement novel solutions to the ones we can't (hello taxes, please speak to my accountant!).

If you're running a company and have run into some wicked problems that need solving, please reach out. Book yourself 30 minutes in my calendar. I'd love to hear from you, to learn what you're wrestling with, and try to help.

Thank you for your attention,
-Jared