“Jonathan helps leadership teams think differently and for themselves.”

Clients describe Jonathan’s work as thought-provoking, intellectually rigorous and immediately practical, helping leadership teams develop a shared understanding, make better enterprise decisions and lead aligned organizations.

  • Jonathan worked with us at ABM for eighteen months, collaborating with everyone from the Board to our executive and operational leaders. He helped us think more clearly and cohesively about our purpose, strategy, and organizational alignment. He is not a typical consultant — his frameworks and skilful facilitation enhanced our leadership thinking and fostered genuine alignment across the organization. As a result, we now have a clearer and more confident direction for the future.

    Scott Salmirs
    President and CEO, ABM Industries Inc.

  • Jonathan’s process challenged our Executive Board to think differently about strategic positioning, organizational capability, and design by asking precisely the right questions at exactly the right moments. His unique approach blends an exceptional ability to read the room with rigorous research insights, guiding leaders not on what to think but how to think through a candid, self directed journey of discovery. The result was clear strategic alignment uniting our leadership team around a long term vision and the steps required to achieve it.


    Zack Bingham
    Chief of Staff; The Winn-Dixie Company

  • Jonathan was able to take a leadership team mostly new to management from where they were (a group with a wide range of understandings and viewpoints) to where they needed to be (a singular one that clearly saw the challenge ahead of them). He prepared the team intellectually and emotionally to take on the realignment of the Institute to its fundamental purpose. To a person, team members had broad praise for his methods and knowledge – a delightful blend of rigor, humor, compassion, straight talk, case studies, and key business principles. The result was a team that was more practical, professional, and prepared for the work ahead.


    Ravi S. Rajan
    President, California Institute of the Arts

  • I have worked with Jonathan over several years, initially to take a holistic look at our organisation purpose and then to design an approach to addressing the challenge of often complex and competing priorities of aligning purpose with delivery. Jonathan’s approach to helping leaders achieve alignment as the number one priority has stayed with me through three strategy cycles and significant change programmes within a not-for-profit, purpose driven professional body.


    Dr Helen Pain MBE
    Chief Executive, Royal Society of Chemistry

  • Jonathan Trevor is one of the clearest thinkers on organisational alignment I have encountered. His work, including Re:Align, captures something many leadership teams intuit but often struggle to implement. Jonathan combines deep academic rigor with a pragmatic understanding of how complex enterprises function. His framework gives leaders practical ways to diagnose misalignment, clarify priorities, and ensure strategy, structure, and execution move in concert.


    Martyn Etherington
    Chief Marketing Officer, BMC Software

  • Jonathan Trevor has, over a period of several years, consistently enlightened, challenged and stimulated the newly promoted generals on the Army Generalship Programme; without question, his work has enhanced the Army’s operating effectiveness.


    Maj Gen Dr Andrew Sharpe, CBE
    British Army

  • Working with Jonathan Trevor was a true shift in perspective. His Strategic Alignment Framework is not just a model; it is a lens that transforms how you think and lead. He brings rare clarity to complexity and shows why organisations fall short of their potential and how to close that gap. An exceptional sparring partner, he challenges and elevates your thinking with precision.


    Philippe Clarinval
    General Manager, Prince de Galles

  • Jonathan Trevor elevated our leadership conversation to new levels and engaged the team in visioning the future and aligning to it.


    Muoi Lien
    Chief of Staff, Taskize

A different kind of advisor

Most advisors bring experience. Some bring research.
Very few bring both.

Jonathan Trevor combines original research, practical frameworks, and more than 25 years of work with executive leadership teams to help organisations become more coherent, more aligned, and higher-performing.

Rather than providing answers, Jonathan helps leadership teams think more clearly, make better enterprise decisions and build organisations capable of sustaining superior performance.

Professor

Discovering enduring principles that explain organizational effectiveness through research, teaching and scholarship.

Author

Transforming those ideas into practical frameworks that help leaders understand, diagnose and improve organizational performance.

Advisor

Working directly with executive leadership teams to apply those frameworks to the complex realities of leading modern organizations.

Together, these three roles create a distinctive way of helping leadership teams think, decide and lead.

Jonathan’s ideas have not been developed in isolation.

For more than twenty-five years he has worked alongside hundreds of executive leadership teams across private, public and not-for-profit organisations throughout Europe, North America, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America.

This continual interaction between research and practice is central to his work. Every engagement generates new insight. Every piece of research is tested against organisational reality.

The result is not theory for its own sake, nor consulting based solely on experience, but a continually evolving body of knowledge that is both intellectually rigorous and practically relevant.

Research that shapes practice

Practice that shapes research.

Jonathan is Professor of Management Practice and Associate Dean at Oxford University’s Saïd Business School. He holds a PhD in Management Studies from the University of Cambridge and has spent his career researching what makes organisations effective.

His work has been published in leading journals including Harvard Business Review and MIT Sloan Management Review, and he is the author of Align, Re:Align and The Alignment Advantage. His research has also featured in the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, BBC, CNN, Forbes and other international media.

At the centre of this work is a simple but enduring question: What makes organisations truly effective? Jonathan’s answer is strategic alignment.

Read more about working with Jonathan

Is this the right conversation?

Jonathan’s work is most valuable when leadership teams are asking questions such as:

  • Why isn’t our strategy translating into organisational performance?

  • Why do important decisions take longer than they should?

  • Why do different parts of the organisation seem to be pulling in different directions?

  • How can we create greater coherence across the enterprise?

  • How can our leadership team become more aligned around the choices that matter most?

If those questions sound familiar, there is a good chance the conversation will be worthwhile.

Read more about leadership alignment

Start a conversation about your leadership alignment challenge

If strategy is not translating into results, decisions feel slower than they should, execution is inconsistent, or your organisation feels fragmented despite everyone’s best efforts, the underlying issue is often a lack of leadership alignment.

If that sounds familiar, I’d be delighted to start a conversation.