In this episode of The Purposeful Strategist, Belden Menkus speaks with Jeroen Douglas, Director General of the International Cooperative Alliance (ICA), about what it takes to hold together a global movement of around a billion members, and why the cooperative model may be better suited to the coming decades than its low profile suggests.

Founded in 1895, the ICA is the global voice of the cooperative movement, representing roughly three million cooperatives across more than a hundred countries. In their conversation, they discuss:

• Why Jeroen sees cooperatives as the largest enduring alternative to shareholder capitalism and attributes their resilience to the practice of distributing wealth to the community before profits.

• The ICA’s new Practice, Promote and Protect strategy, including the challenge of raising capital without compromising cooperative identity, and building a sovereign cooperative cloud as an alternative to big tech.

• How worker-owned models for app-based companies are emerging as a credible answer to the gig economy.

• How Jeroen keeps a movement spanning rival nations and rival politics united, and why he believes cooperatives are "builders of peace," able to disagree and still collaborate.

ICA: https://www.ica.coop/

Menkus & Associates: https://www.menkus.com/

Supported by Norman Broadbent: https://www.normanbroadbent.com/

Belden Menkus is the Managing Director of Menkus & Associates, a senior strategic advisory practice that provides strategic clarity for businesses with a public remit, where scrutiny is high, governance is complex, and the answers aren’t obvious. His McKinsey training combined with more than 30 years working at Board and ExCo level gives him both the analytical rigour and the relational experience that complex, high-stakes leadership situations demand.

Belden hosts The Purposeful Strategist, a weekly podcast. It explores how senior leaders bring purpose to life through strategy and reflects the same questions that drive the consulting work.

In this episode of The Purposeful Strategist, Belden Menkus speaks with Dr. Philo Daniel, Chief Executive Officer of LPA Group, about leading the transformation of a specialised engineering business.

LPA Group is an engineering specialist in electronic and electro-mechanical components and systems, serving transport, aerospace, defence and infrastructure markets. Philo joined as CEO at the start of 2025 with the goal of redirecting the business.

In their conversation, they discuss:

· The ‘One LPA’ vision: Philo’s first move was to combine four quasi-independent divisions into a single functional structure. On this, she discusses how a rebranding is helping the new culture to stick.

· A strategy for doubling the business in three years: organic growth to a point, then an acquisition of significant scale.

· The vertical integration dilemma: Philo weighs having a sovereign supply chain against the commercial reality of competing with businesses that have offshored.

· STEM, apprenticeships and the skills pipeline: why Philo sees outreach to schools and colleges not just as giving back to the community, but as a structural necessity for businesses like LPA.

· Philo’s experience since joining LPA: being a first-time CEO, the shift from large corporate to smaller listed business, and the importance of both listening and taking decisive action.

LPA Group: https://www.lpa-group.com/

Menkus & Associates: https://www.menkus.com/

Supported by Norman Broadbent: https://www.normanbroadbent.com/

Belden Menkus is the Managing Director of Menkus & Associates, a senior strategic advisory practice that provides strategic clarity for businesses with a public remit, where scrutiny is high, governance is complex, and the answers aren’t obvious. His McKinsey training combined with more than 30 years working at Board and ExCo level gives him both the analytical rigour and the relational experience that complex, high-stakes leadership situations demand.

Belden hosts The Purposeful Strategist, a weekly podcast. It explores how senior leaders bring purpose to life through strategy and reflects the same questions that drive the consulting work.

In this episode of The Purposeful Strategist, Belden Menkus speaks with Steve Boam, CEO of Develop Consulting, who shares a bold vision for productivity in the UK.

In their conversation, they discuss:

· Why Lean is fundamentally about people and process, and how these principles can be applied far beyond the car factory floor, regardless of scale or speed of production.

· How Develop works shoulder to shoulder with clients to transfer knowledge rather than simply handing over a report.

· What Lean thinking offers UK healthcare: designing care around the patient rather than the institution, and helping the NHS meet its productivity challenges.

· Why worker empowerment means flipping the pyramid: putting the person doing the work at the top.

· Why middle management is often a sticking point for change, and what to do about it.

Develop Consulting: https://develop-consulting.co.uk/

Menkus & Associates: https://www.menkus.com/

Supported by Norman Broadbent: https://www.normanbroadbent.com/

Belden Menkus is the Managing Director of Menkus & Associates, a senior strategic advisory practice that provides strategic clarity for businesses with a public remit, where scrutiny is high, governance is complex, and the answers aren’t obvious. His McKinsey training combined with more than 30 years working at Board and ExCo level gives him both the analytical rigour and the relational experience that complex, high-stakes leadership situations demand.

Belden hosts The Purposeful Strategist, a weekly podcast. It explores how senior leaders bring purpose to life through strategy and reflects the same questions that drive the consulting work.

In this episode of The Purposeful Strategist, Belden Menkus speaks with Martyn Fish, Chief Executive and Partner at HGF, about building a challenger firm in a centuries-old profession, and the strategic choices behind its shift from partnership to private equity ownership.

Martyn joined HGF over 20 years ago and led its European law team for more than a decade before becoming CEO in 2021. He has since taken the firm from a partnership of around 55 partners to a CBPE-backed business approaching 500 people across the UK and mainland Europe. In their conversation, they discuss:

• Why the firm moved on from its partnership model: cumbersome decision-making, capital constraints, and a focus on in-year profit were slowing growth. He discusses what changed once the firm had private equity backing and a long-term view.

• What makes a good private equity partner. Martyn explains why they chose a deal with CBPE, why the right investor acts as a critical friend rather than a controller, and how the firm communicated the change to win its people over.

• Redefining the role of an IP firm. Martyn elaborates on his ambition to move attorneys from technical specialists to trusted advisors who understand a client’s business strategy, value drivers, and investment needs.

• How AI is freeing up higher-value client time, and why strength, depth, and a deliberately nurtured challenger culture matter as the firm continues to grow.

HGF: https://www.hgf.com/

Menkus & Associates: https://www.menkus.com/

Supported by Norman Broadbent: https://www.normanbroadbent.com/

Belden Menkus is the Managing Director of Menkus & Associates, a senior strategic advisory practice that provides strategic clarity for businesses with a public remit, where scrutiny is high, governance is complex, and the answers aren’t obvious. His McKinsey training combined with more than 30 years working at Board and ExCo level gives him both the analytical rigour and the relational experience that complex, high-stakes leadership situations demand.

Belden hosts The Purposeful Strategist, a weekly podcast. It explores how senior leaders bring purpose to life through strategy and reflects the same questions that drive the consulting work.

In this episode of The Purposeful Strategist, Belden Menkus speaks with Dr. Peter Thompson, Chief Executive of the National Physical Laboratory, about leading an organisation whose expertise in calibration, testing, and measurement standards underpins almost everything in our society — and which must do so as a business, winning contracts on merit and demonstrating return on public money.

In their conversation, they discuss:

· How NPL acts as connective tissue between scientific expertise and the economy: providing the certainty in measurement that companies across sectors rely on as they innovate and scale.

· How Peter has reoriented NPL from a culture of excellent science for its own sake towards one that is externally focused on the needs of society, industry and government, including a restructure of the executive team and a deliberate effort to sharpen accountability and speed up decision-making.

· The challenge of balancing near-term delivery with research that requires long time horizons.

· Peter's approach to leadership in a rapidly changing environment, and how NPL is positioning itself now.

NPL: https://www.npl.co.uk/
Menkus & Associates: https://www.menkus.com/
Supported by Norman Broadbent: https://www.normanbroadbent.com/

Belden Menkus is the Managing Director of Menkus & Associates, a senior strategic advisory practice that provides strategic clarity for businesses with a public remit, where scrutiny is high, governance is complex, and the answers aren't obvious. His McKinsey training combined with more than 30 years working at Board and ExCo level gives him both the analytical rigour and the relational experience that complex, high-stakes leadership situations demand.

Belden hosts The Purposeful Strategist, a weekly podcast. It explores how senior leaders bring purpose to life through strategy and reflects the same questions that drive the consulting work.

In this episode of The Purposeful Strategist, Belden Menkus speaks with Stuart Wallace, Chief Executive of Forth Ports Limited, about what it takes to lead critical national infrastructure at a moment of profound transition — and what a long career inside one organisation teaches you about strategy, culture, and purpose.

Stuart joined Forth Ports in 2002 as financial controller for its Scottish operations, making a habit of getting to know people in other roles and ‘what makes the business tick.’ He became COO in 2016 and Chief Executive in 2024, having held nine different roles across the group. Today, Forth Ports handles around 30 million tonnes of cargo a year across eight sites, employs over 1,300 people, and holds statutory harbour authority responsibility for the Forth and Tay estuaries.

In their conversation, they discuss:

• What ports do, and what’s at stake if they don’t work, particularly for an island nation like the UK.

• The purpose of Forth Ports to act as an economic driver for trade and their other areas of operation, and how this purpose is supported by their strong values of collaboration and dependability.

• How Forth Ports approached the energy transition: recognising that the market was pivoting to renewables and investing in offshore wind infrastructure at Dundee without a single contract in place. They are now delivering foundations for a 1.2 gigawatt wind farm out of Leith.

• The discipline of long-horizon strategy: why a port operator can take infrastructure risk that other businesses can’t, and how Stuart thinks about investment decisions for assets that will still matter many decades from now.

• What it means to lead a business that is simultaneously commercial, statutory, and community-rooted, and how Stuart has made the organisation’s values felt on the ground, not just posted on a wall.

Forth Ports: https://www.forthports.co.uk/

Menkus & Associates: https://www.menkus.com/

Supported by Norman Broadbent: https://www.normanbroadbent.com/

Belden Menkus is the Managing Director of Menkus & Associates, a senior strategic advisory practice that provides strategic clarity for businesses with a public remit, where scrutiny is high, governance is complex, and the answers aren’t obvious. His McKinsey training combined with more than 30 years working at Board and ExCo level gives him both the analytical rigour and the relational experience that complex, high-stakes leadership situations demand.

Belden hosts The Purposeful Strategist, a weekly podcast. It explores how senior leaders bring purpose to life through strategy and reflects the same questions that drive the consulting work.

In this episode of The Purposeful Strategist, Belden Menkus speaks with Ben Fletcher, Chief Executive of Logistics UK, about what it means to be the voice for an industry that employs 2.7 million people, makes up around 8–9% of the UK economy, and underpins almost every aspect of daily life.

Ben came to Logistics UK from Make UK, the trade association for manufacturing, where a decade of experience at the intersection of government, policy, and industry left him convinced that logistics was the missing link in the UK’s economic growth story. In their conversation, they discuss:

• Why logistics is the precondition for economic growth, not simply a contributor, and why Ben believes government has yet to fully grasp that dependency.

• The organisation Ben inherited: 22,000 member organisations spanning SMEs and global firms, 350 staff, 130 years of history, with a well-regarded vehicle inspection and compliance business operating in a competitive market.

• A strategy for becoming the single voice for an industry covering road, rail, air, and sea transport — and on making an economy-wide argument, not just a sector-specific one, to put logistics at the centre of national policy debate.

• The role of data and anecdote in political influence: how data gets you in the room, and how the right story from a member gets things done.

• COVID as a test of the sector’s public purpose — and what it revealed about an industry whose people kept going when most others stayed home.

• How AI and technology can be transformative for efficiency in logistics, without replacing the human judgment that still sits at the controls of vehicles, trains, planes, and ships.

• Both challenges and optimism for the workforce: an ageing industry, a compelling social mobility story, and a lobbying agenda that’s pushing back on the assumption that a university degree is the only route to a successful career.

Logistics UK: https://www.logistics.org.uk/

Menkus & Associates: https://www.menkus.com/

Supported by Norman Broadbent: https://www.normanbroadbent.com/

Belden Menkus is the Managing Director of Menkus & Associates, a senior strategic advisory practice that provides strategic clarity for businesses with a public remit, where scrutiny is high, governance is complex, and the answers aren’t obvious. His McKinsey training combined with more than 30 years working at Board and ExCo level gives him both the analytical rigour and the relational experience that complex, high-stakes leadership situations demand.

Belden hosts The Purposeful Strategist, a weekly podcast. It explores how senior leaders bring purpose to life through strategy and reflects the same questions that drive the consulting work.

In this episode of The Purposeful Strategist, Belden Menkus speaks with Colin Walsh, founder and Board Chair of Civitas ID, about the foundational struggle for the world's millions of displaced people: the ability to prove their identity across borders, and the infrastructure needed to enable it.

Colin's career in financial services, including as CEO of Varo Bank, taught him that some of the most difficult problems of exclusion are upstream of banking access, and lie in proving identity. He is tackling this problem with Civitas through building open-source digital public infrastructure for the roughly 123 million people currently living in a state of forced displacement. In their conversation, they discuss:

Why identity is a foundational barrier for displaced people trying to access work, banking, healthcare, and education, and how documentation failures trap people in limbo.

The structure of Civitas (a US nonprofit) and Etymos (a public benefit corporation): how the two organizations work together to serve both the public good and the private sector participants, banks, lenders, employers, whose engagement is essential to facilitating inclusion.

Why technology is not the only factor: how Colin and his team stress-test ideas directly with displaced communities, why policy reform and advocacy matter as much as technology, and what genuine listening, as opposed to validation-seeking, looks like in practice.

Kenya and Colombia as pilot markets, and what the contrast between the two markets reveals about pace, partnership, and the conditions that enable systemic change.

Civitas ID: https://www.civitasid.org/

Etymos: https://www.etymosid.com/

Menkus & Associates: https://www.menkus.com/

Supported by Norman Broadbent: https://www.normanbroadbent.com/

Belden Menkus is the Managing Director of Menkus & Associates, a senior strategic advisory practice that provides strategic clarity for businesses with a public remit, where scrutiny is high, governance is complex, and the answers aren't obvious. His McKinsey training combined with more than 30 years working at Board and ExCo level gives him both the analytical rigour and the relational experience that complex, high-stakes leadership situations demand.

Belden hosts The Purposeful Strategist, a weekly podcast. It explores how senior leaders bring purpose to life through strategy and reflects the same questions that drive the consulting work.