Nicolas is the Head of Sustainability Consulting at Ashridge Business School having joined in October 2008.  He has ten years experience of managing and advising businesses in a wide range of areas.  He joined from the Scandinavian risk and management consultancy group Acona CMG where he was a partner. Prior to this he was a founder member of the Carbon Neutral Company, a now global business specialising in retail Carbon Trading and Climate Change education.

Nicolas is currently co-designing the next phase of research around leadership in the 21st century (www.ashridge.org.uk/globalleaders) as well as examining how recommendations from the first phase, around connectedness, complexity and context, translate into the way we think about leading, innovating, and collaborating today.

Nick has experience of supporting organisations large and small, mainly in the UK, US and Asia specifically to help them manage and lead in dealing with complex social and environmental issues.  He is particularly interested in collaboration and partnering in this regard, and this led him to participate in the PCCP programme at Cambridge in 2003 and supporting Business Partnerships for Development (established by the World Bank Group) to identify successful transferable partnership approaches for development work. He holds a 2.1 (Hons) in Geography specialising in development approaches to arid regions, a CIM advanced certificate in marketing and an MCert in Multi-Sector Partnerships. He is currently completing an MSc in Organisational Consulting.

Current client work includes:

Supporting a senior management inquiry into innovative sustainable strategies for the life sciences and material sciences sector. Running separate workshops covering new ways to think about and manage strategic challenges for the 21st century.

Leadership programme. Helping senior managers to be effective in times of constrained resources, including the importance of multi-sector working and close collaboration in building resilient responses.

Senior Executive Programme – working with senior managers to help them to engage with in different cultural contexts in order to develop responses to licence to operate issues posed by the challenge of climate change pan-Europe.

MBA Business and Society module – teaching sessions on frameworks for thinking about complex social problems and authentic approaches to marketing and communications.

Additional Interests:

Nick teaches scuba diving, and is a director of Scuba Experience Ltd, an organisation specialising in teaching literacy and maths to children with learning difficulties using metaphors offered by the underwater world.