FAQs

(because I know you've got them)

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What’s your background?

A lifetime of paying attention. Formally — pre-law, psychology, sociology, business. Twenty-five years in pharmaceuticals, the last ten at the frontier of radiopharmaceuticals. Along the way — a produced screenplay, a book, a magazine column, and enough time inside enough different rooms to understand that every system, regardless of industry, is ultimately a human story with the same essential tensions. The perception didn’t come from any single program or role. It came from the accumulation. The background is just the list of ingredients. The work is what they produced.

 

What market do you serve?

Complex systems at a moment of consequence. Industry is just the address. Radiopharmaceuticals is where the perception was built and battle-tested. It is not the fence around the yard.

 

Is SALK an "I" or a "we"?

Both, depending on what the moment requires. At its core, SALK is one perspective — undiluted, unfiltered, and deliberately singular. But we is also accurate. It is the royal we of a firm with a point of view. The collective we of the clients, collaborators, and relationships that make the work possible. And the future we of what this becomes. When you engage SALK you get one mind fully committed. The we is the context around it.

 

Why should I trust one person’s opinion over a team of specialists?

Because a team of specialists is precisely the problem you’re trying to solve. You already have groupthink. What you don’t have is someone who sits outside all of it, owes nothing to any of it, and can see the whole system at once. Specialists know their lane. We know the road.

 

How do I know your perception isn’t just bias with good branding?

First, thank you for your appreciation of the branding. Second, we all have bias. That’s the cornerstone of insight. Recognizing it and proceeding accordingly — that’s the cornerstone of objectivity. You’re not asked to trust the opinion. You’re given everything you need to evaluate it.

 

Do you have a structured approach?

Yes. The work follows a framework we call LIR — Listen, Identify, Recommend. It is not a methodology imposed on your situation. It is the sequence that honest perception requires. You cannot identify what you haven’t truly heard. You cannot recommend what you haven’t accurately identified. The framework exists to protect the integrity of the output, not to create the appearance of process.

 

What does the engagement actually look like day to day?

We get access to the people and environments that matter — not just the leadership narrative but the places where the organization actually lives. The things said in the margins. We’re not extracting data. We’re listening to what the system reveals without meaning to. The work in the early days is to create the conditions where that’s possible and then we evolve from there.

 

How long does it take?

Long enough to hear what the organization is actually saying. Not so long that we become part of the system we’re trying to see. That tension is real and we manage it deliberately. Four to twelve weeks, depending on complexity. We agree on the timeline before we begin and we hold to it.

 

What does an engagement cost?

Engagements are scoped and priced individually based on complexity, duration, and the nature of the work. SALK operates on a flat fee model — agreed upon before we begin, fixed regardless of what the work reveals. If you’d like to discuss what an engagement might look like for your situation, that’s exactly what the thirty minute conversation is for.

 

Why flat fee?

Because billing by the hour rewards time spent rather than clarity achieved. A flat fee says the work costs what it costs regardless of how quickly or slowly the truth reveals itself. You’re buying the outcome. Not the hours.

 

Why three to five clients?

Because revelation doesn’t scale. Three to five means when we’re in your engagement we’re entirely in your engagement. You’re not getting a fraction of our attention. You’re getting all of it. The limitation is the point.

 

How do I justify this internally?

Lead with the cost of not doing it. In your environment, the margin for misalignment is measured in years and hundreds of millions of dollars. Frame it that way and the conversation changes.

 

What does success look like?

You see something you couldn’t see before. And that shift changes a real decision — one with real consequences — that would otherwise have been made through silted water. We don’t measure success in deliverables. We measure it in the quality of your next move.

 

We’ve worked with several of the major consulting firms. Why is this different?

Those firms arrive with a framework and apply it to your situation. The output reflects what they already know how to do as much as it reflects you. Nobody at a large firm hands you a finding that makes the partner uncomfortable or jeopardizes the renewal. SALK has no renewal to protect. What you get is a single perspective, unfiltered, with no incentive to tell you anything other than exactly what we see. Groupthink has a remarkable ability to make everyone feel confident about the wrong answer.

 

How do you decide whether to take an engagement?

Three things. A situation complex enough that perception is actually the limiting factor. A leader willing to hear something they might not want to hear. And whether or not the concept is interesting. If any of the three are missing the engagement won’t produce what it’s capable of. We’d rather not take the work than deliver something neither of us is proud of.

 

What makes a client wrong for SALK?

Someone whose sole intent is validation. A client who has already decided on the answer and needs an outside voice to ratify it. We can usually suss this out in the first conversation. The goal isn’t to disagree — it’s to ensure that the integrity of what we find and identify is preserved.

 

What if the recommendation is something we can’t or won’t do?

Sometimes the most valuable thing we can tell you is that the solution requires something you haven’t been willing to say out loud yet. It’s better to name the constraint clearly than to pretend the path is open when it isn’t. If you find the path to be valid we can work together to put a plan in place.

 

What if you find something we already knew?

Good. The value isn’t always discovery. Sometimes it’s permission — having someone from outside look at it honestly and say: yes, we’re seeing it how you’re seeing it, here’s what it means, here’s what to do. That permission has real value. Especially when what you already know is something your organization has been reluctant to hear.

 

What if the people I need you to talk to won’t speak honestly? What if the organization closes ranks?

Everyone talks. Even when they’re not saying anything. Silence is data. Deflection is data. The shape of what people won’t say is often more revealing than what they will. In our experience people do talk — because we’re not their boss, not their colleague, and we have no stake in the political architecture of their organization. We’re just someone genuinely interested in what they see. That tends to open doors that have been closed for years.

 

Do you help with implementation?

That depends on what the engagement reveals. SALK’s primary work is perceptual — we find what you can’t see and tell you what it means. But some situations call for more than a recommendation. Where the findings reveal a structural or organizational challenge that requires a defined system to address, we have the frameworks and the experience to build it. We don’t lead with that. We don’t assume it. But we don’t walk away from a situation that needs it either. The path forward is whatever the path requires. That has always been the promise.

 

What happens if you’re wrong?

We feel the weight of it. That’s precisely why we limit the work to three to five clients. We want to feel the tension and responsibility that come with the insight. It will never be for lack of preparation. Or honesty about what we find.

 

Have you ever delivered a recommendation that was ignored?

Yes. It was less a recommendation than a siren. We saw what was coming clearly and said so plainly and the organization chose not to hear it. They’re still digging out. We don’t tell that story to be dramatic. We tell it because it’s the honest answer to your question — and because it’s the reason we qualify every engagement as carefully as we do. We’re not interested in delivering findings into an organization that has already decided not to act on them. That’s not a SALK engagement. That’s theater. And we’ve already established our position on theater.

 

What’s the hardest engagement you’ve ever had? What did you get wrong?

We made recommendations before we had the full picture. We heard enough to be confident and moved before we’d verified what we thought we knew. The recommendations weren’t wrong in direction but they were wrong in sequence — we got ahead of what the organization was actually ready to hear and ready to do. What we learned is simple and we’ve never forgotten it. Trust but verify. Perception without patience is just a fast opinion. The Listen phase exists for a reason. We don’t abbreviate it anymore regardless of how clear things appear early.

 

Who else are you working with? Could there be a conflict of interest?

We don’t discuss current or past clients. Ever. Not their names, not their industries, not the nature of the work. That’s not a policy. It’s the only way the work is possible. The same discretion that protects them protects you. What happens inside your organization stays there. Full stop.

 

Have you ever walked away from a client?

Yes. And we’d do it again. If the real problem is one the organization has no appetite to address we’ll say so and return the fee. There’s no version of SALK that survives producing work we don’t believe in.

 

Why Amsterdam?

My family is here. And being outside the American market — outside the particular gravity of how things are done there — turns out to be an advantage. Distance is its own form of clarity.

 

Why now?

Because we’ve spent a lifetime developing the perception to do this work at the level it deserves. Twenty-five years in pharmaceuticals sharpened the instinct. Everything before that built the foundation. The timing isn’t accidental. It’s the result of everything that came before it.