Why I refuse to be indispensable

I push myself out of a job, and I do it on purpose.

When I have helped set up a foundation or charity properly, the founders often offer me the chief executive's seat. I turn it down. That isn't modesty. It's the test. Governance that only works while you are in the room isn't governance, it's dependency, and dependency is what many advisory relationships quietly sell. If a structure can't survive my absence, I haven't built it properly.

What I do instead is move into oversight: chairing a grant-making committee, advising a board. The work changes from doing to making sure it holds as it scales, that the policies still bite three years on, and that nobody has quietly rebuilt what we spent months dismantling.

What you see from oversight

From that seat you see across several families and funds at once, and you notice the duplication: two family offices funding the same programme separately, both underpowered; a foundation about to build a capability another already has. Some of the most useful work I have done has been introducing people who should have been in a room together years ago, and turning that into co-funded structures rather than parallel cheques. However large you are, you never have enough to do everything you want.

Almost none of that is paid. Introducing a funder to another funder, or to a charity doing serious work, isn't billable and I have never tried to make it so. You do it because it is right, and you trust your network, and God, to keep the paid work coming. The farmer plants and tends the seed; he doesn't make the rain fall.

Staying in the room

You do have to stay findable. When a family office is setting up a foundation, or a board's compliance starts coming apart, people call someone they have heard of. Being in the room also keeps the thinking honest. I have facilitated sessions and board meetings for government agencies, international NGO leadership teams, family offices, foundations and businesses of every size. Among people who have deployed capital across dozens of countries, faced regulators and rebuilt boards from scratch, you find out quickly whether your work holds up. Twenty years in, I still get corrected. That is the point.

A job done well means I'm no longer needed. I made my peace with that long ago. It is the only version of this work worth doing.