Adrian Peryer
Bio
I design and facilitate Customer Advisory Boards for technology companies — meetings where a company's most important customers help shape its strategic direction. Most CABs are death by PowerPoint and polite show-and-tell. The ones I facilitate are the opposite: candid, sometimes uncomfortable, and the meeting executives tell me they most look forward to all year.
Nearly all of this work is confidential. My clients are protective of their CABs, locking in next year's dates before this year's is over, and trusting that I'll serve them and not their competitors. Occasionally the work surfaces in public: a CEO posts a photo, or asks me to be in the room at their investor day to "show the work to Wall Street." But I'm happy off stage, because the real value is in those co-creation conversations, with product managers, general managers, and their customers, and those never go according to plan. Nearly every session has a moment one of my favourite CXOs accurately called "a total shit show." That's the point. Failing in front of a whiteboard together. Co-creating until the problem is truly understood. Arguing over the hard trade-offs. It all beats failing after spending millions on a solution to the wrong problem.
That principle - candour is something you earn and build, not demand or dismiss - runs through my writing. I publish where I see a gap worth filling: on generative organizational culture, on leadership, and on what it takes to grow in the age of AI — from Thriving in the Age of AI: The Generative Advantage to a recent piece using the Post Office Horizon scandal to show the power of the Westrum continuum. I've contributed to more than a dozen podcasts and spent hours in conversation with Ron Westrum, whose work on generative cultures underpins my work. I've also shared with Ron how his framework connects with others we use in ways that helps some leaders steer the transformation to an agentic enterprise.
These are connected concepts, approached from different directions, and they converge in the meetings I design and facilitate: the best decisions come from rooms where people are fully engaged in a hard problem, co-creating, immersed, losing track of time in a state of flow and, through that collaboration, producing more than any of them could alone.