BUSINESS TRANSFORMATION CONSULTING
Strategy gets decided in one room. It succeeds or fails in all the others.
Somewhere between the decision and day-to-day business, most organisations lose momentum. That is where my work starts: finding out how decisions are really made, agreeing the future operating model with the leadership team, and staying through implementation until the new way of working holds across functions, sites and countries. With senior executives, I work as a sparring partner for thinking decisions through.
Clients include BASF · BMW · BorgWarner · Continental · Danfoss · KOSTAL · Roland Berger · Union Investment
SITUATIONS
When companies bring me in.
My work doesn’t start with a topic. It starts with a situation. Five come up again and again:
Two units have been merged. Their people haven’t.
On paper it is one organisation; in practice it is still two. Responsibilities overlap, decisions stall, and the leadership team spends its energy aligning instead of running the business.
AFTERWARDS
One leadership team that decides as one.
The company has outgrown the way it is run.
What worked with thirty people doesn’t work with three hundred. Priorities compete, commitments slip, and the top team is still deciding things it should have delegated long ago.
AFTERWARDS
Management decides less and leads more.
A new leadership team has to perform from day one.
After changes at the top, the people in the room have no shared way of working yet, and everyone is watching to see whether they deliver.
AFTERWARDS
A shared way of working that holds under scrutiny.
The transformation has been approved. Nothing has changed.
The target picture is clear, the town hall has happened, and day-to-day work carries on as before.
AFTERWARDS
The new direction shows up in everyday decisions, not just on slides.
The start-up has become a company. Everything still runs through the founders.
The funding is in, the team grows month by month, often across several countries. Decisions wait for the founders, managers are leading for the first time, and the culture of the early years no longer carries itself.
AFTERWARDS
Decisions get made without the founders, and the pace holds.
ABOUT ME
Who you would be working with.
I grew up in Canada and have lived and worked in Germany since 1990. For more than twenty years I have advised companies on change, from owner-led businesses to the leadership teams of global groups, and I have supported German, American and French companies in 40 countries.
I studied political science and political theory in Toronto, and I still look at organisations as networks of decisions, interests and commitments rather than boxes on an organisation chart.
Two management cultures have shaped how I work: the North American habit of deciding quickly and adjusting along the way, and the German habit of thinking things through before committing. Most international leadership teams need both, and much of the friction I see starts where the two meet.
New mandates today come through recommendation. For larger projects I work with experienced colleagues from my network.
Focus areas
- Building the organisational frame for a high-performance culture people want to be part of
- Setting up people and teams so that they carry change themselves and keep developing it
- Choosing management and working routines for open, accountable collaboration, and making them stick in daily business
- Laying the foundations for the organisation to keep developing from within, including its structures and responsibilities
ACROSS BORDERS
Where cultures meet in one leadership team.
Many of my mandates involve more than one country. Three constellations come up often:
German companies abroad.Subsidiaries in North America, Asia or elsewhere in Europe, often after an acquisition or reorganisation, when collaboration across borders stalls.
International companies in Germany.Leadership teams working out how decisions get made in a culture shaped by works councils, co-determination and long planning horizons.
Fast-growing tech companies.Teams that span many nationalities and several time zones, and are scaling faster than their leadership structures.
I work in English and German. Consulting usually takes place on site; executive coaching works just as well online.
HOW I WORK
Every mandate follows the situation.
Understand the situation
I find out how decisions are actually made in your organisation: in conversations with the people involved, by sitting in on leadership meetings, and by reviewing the management reports and governance documents you already have. The result is an assessment specific enough to disagree with.
Agree the operating model
With the leadership team, we work out how the organisation will work in future: roles, decision rights, governance, escalation paths. The result is clear enough to decide on, not open to interpretation.
Stay through implementation
I stay until the new way of working holds in daily business, and work with the people responsible wherever it doesn’t yet.
Check that it works
The end result is not a concept paper but an organisation that decides differently, which you can verify against the very issues that used to stall.
VOICES
What leaders say about working with me.
“Perspective and not just advice.”
“Looking back, there have been a handful of people in my career who have made a real impact on my personal development. Tom is definitely one of them. His way of working strengthens any group or team; his true value to me personally, however, lies in the one-to-one coaching I have been able to draw on in my various leadership roles. By providing perspective and not just advice, he enables me to continuously self-reflect, always appropriate to my particular situation. With his inimitable personality, he always encourages me to focus on the individual and the specific circumstances rather than on tools and methods. A truly unique coach!”
“A trusted listener and sounding board.”
“For more than 15 years, across several roles and situations, Tom Klein has worked with me personally and with my leadership teams. Throughout that time he has been a reliable sparring partner and a valuable source of ideas, but above all a trusted listener and sounding board. However intense our sessions were, the next day it always felt as if I had taken an important step, whether towards resolving an issue or further along my own path.”
“One of the most valuable investments in my professional and personal development.”
“I have worked with Tom for over a decade and I can confidently say that this collaboration has been one of the most valuable investments in my professional and personal development. Tom has an unparalleled talent for developing customized strategies that are perfectly suited to my individual needs. He is a master at facilitating both individuals and teams to successfully navigate their own learning journeys.
What I particularly appreciate about Tom is his ability to stay ahead of the curve of the developing needs and challenges of our times. His support and expertise have been invaluable to my success and continued development. I am incredibly grateful to Tom for the lasting impact he has had on my professional and personal journey.”
LISTEN AND WATCH
How I think about organisations.
If you would like an impression before we speak: in the podcast “Living Transformation” and in interviews, I talk about change, leadership and what keeps organisations alive.
Podcast “Living Transformation” (in German)
Conversations about change, leadership and organisations that stay alive.
VITALITY IN PEOPLE AND ORGANISATIONS
Where organisations draw their strength.
Picture an organisation that runs on energy rather than pressure. People take responsibility not because a rule says so, but because they have a stake in what is being built. Ideas reach the people who make decisions, and decisions reach the people who have to carry them out.
Most organisations operate far below that potential. Not for lack of talent, but because people have adapted to narrow expectations and rigid structures. Anyone who has learned over the years that initiative is risky will bring only a fraction of their energy to work.
The key is to invest in reflection: in people rethinking their roles, and in teams looking at how they work together.
That means giving people in key roles the room to think a changed role through before they have to fill it. And giving leadership teams the chance to look at their own collaboration with the same seriousness they bring to the numbers.
Vitality cannot be ordered. It grows where leaders are willing to work on their own role, and where the organisation makes room for that. At the very top, this work often starts with a confidential conversation.
EXECUTIVE COACHING
It is lonely at the top. What is missing is a place to think a decision through before it is made.
In these conversations I bring no content of my own. I ask questions, give the reflection a structure, and keep the process open until things are clear. The answers come from my client’s situation and apply to that situation.
Founders of fast-growing companies use this space in the same way as board members of established groups.
ENGAGEMENTS
What a mandate looks like.
Selected mandates, anonymised, from situation to outcome.
Decentralising a corporate region
Situation
A heavily centralised, bureaucratic corporate region was making decisions more slowly than its markets demanded. Responsibilities overlapped between regional headquarters and the country organisations, decisions were pushed upwards, and agreements often had no consequences.
The brief
The leadership team was to lead the move to a more decentralised organisation: shifting decisions to where the market and technical knowledge sits, while making commitments more binding. Decentralisation was not to be secured through more control, but through the quality of the leaders and their ability to act accountably.
Approach
In a series of off-sites, the leadership team worked on real escalations and decisions from its own day-to-day business. Together we clarified which questions genuinely need headquarters, where leaders were passing responsibility upwards, and why agreements kept having no consequences. The result was clearer decision rights and an objectives system that names owners, deadlines and priorities.
Outcome
Today the region decides more questions within its own remit and closer to the operating business. Fewer issues are escalated unnecessarily, and every commitment in the leadership team has one owner and one date. The decentralised organisation increasingly rests on accountable leadership rather than on bureaucratic safeguards.
NETWORK
Tom Klein & Co.
For larger projects I work with experienced colleagues I have shared mandates with for years. Where a reorganised company also needs relief on the technical side, I work with NOAVIA.
NETWORK PARTNER
David Gierse · CEO, NOAVIA, Berlin
NOAVIA is a Berlin start-up that gives mid-sized companies digital employees: AI assistants that take over recurring work inside the systems a company already uses, from invoice processing in the ERP to quotes, reporting and document management. No system change, GDPR-compliant, delivered in ten-day sprints.
In my mandates, the question regularly comes up of how a reorganised company can also lighten its workload technically. Where it does, I introduce my clients to NOAVIA.
Technically, NOAVIA can do this on its own. But as with the big IT projects of the past, introducing AI is a change project. It only works if people accept and use the new workflows, and if they are supported along the way: in conversations about roles, responsibility, identity, communication and leadership, and in working sessions on their own cases. In these projects I work alongside NOAVIA, so that a technology change becomes a change in how the company works, one that proves itself in daily business.
Companies I have had the privilege of working with.
Babbel
Baerlocher
BASF
B. Braun
BDR Thermea
Blanco
BMW
BorgWarner
Branding Science
Continental
Credit Suisse
Daimler
Danfoss
DekaBank
DQS
DZ Bank
Eberspächer
Fellowmind
Fuchs
Hessischer Rundfunk
hinderer+mühlich
Hyperbole TV
ID-Ware
Knorr-Bremse
KOSTAL
Krebs & Riedel
Kroll Discovery
KSB
Lanxess
L-Mobile
Mann+Hummel
Markem-Imaje
Max-Planck-Gesellschaft
responsAbility
Roland Berger
Schöpflin Stiftung
Sopra Steria
Sparda Consult
Synthesa
Tehalit
Union Investment
Vaillant
Vesta
Weber Hydraulik
Zotz-Klimas
A CALL TO DECISION-MAKERS
Restore your organisation's vitality.
You have been inside a company like this. Perhaps on a visit: you walk in, and before anyone has explained anything, you can feel the difference. People talk about customers and possibilities, not about who is responsible for what. Responsibility is taken before it is assigned. Perhaps it was your own company, in the years when it was small enough for decisions to be made where the work was done.
Then came growth, and with it the usual trade-off: safety for speed, cover for initiative. That trade-off is not inevitable. The companies that keep both follow a principle that is simple and demanding: a few things are agreed together and are binding, so that everything else can be decided freely. Freedom needs a frame that holds it.
Working with me, that culture gets its backbone: joint planning that produces commitments people keep. Reviews where results count, not reports. Retrospectives in which teams improve how they work together. Objectives that clarify priorities instead of lengthening lists. And, increasingly, AI-supported decision processes that add speed without blurring responsibility. Which of these instruments you need depends on your situation. They are introduced within the project itself, on your real decisions.
And because structures only carry what people carry, the two belong together: room for key people to grow into a changed role, and off-sites in which leadership teams work not only in the organisation but on it.
The decisive question is not which problems need solving. It is what is standing in your organisation’s way.
Vitality is not a soft goal. It shows in decisions that get made instead of going round in circles, and in commitments that hold. Your company once knew this state. The point is not to become small again. The point is to be large and still decide that way. If you want to go down this road, let’s talk about your organisation: about what is holding it back, and about what it is capable of.
CONTACT
A first conversation.
- 01
Write to me or call. I will get back to you within two working days. Your office is welcome to arrange the time.
- 02
We talk for about 45 minutes, by phone or video, in English or German. There is nothing you need to prepare.
- 03
Afterwards you will know whether and how I can help in your situation. The conversation is without obligation.
Phone: +49 172 6711284
Email: mail@tomklein.de
Write to me
Frequently asked questions.
How does a mandate begin?
With a conversation about your situation. I then propose an approach, which usually starts by clarifying where things stand: conversations with the people involved and a review of existing management documents. Scope and duration depend on your situation.
What does it cost?
That depends on the situation and the scope. After our first conversation, you receive a written proposal.
Do you work outside Germany, and in English?
Yes. I work in English and German, with clients across Europe, and in North America and Asia when the work requires it. Consulting usually takes place on site; executive coaching works just as well online.
Do you work with start-ups and scale-ups?
Yes, when a company has grown faster than the way it is run. The work is the same as with established companies: clarifying how decisions are made, and sparring with the founders and the leadership team. The pace is usually higher; the questions are the same.
How confidential is the work?
Completely. Case examples on this page are anonymised. Nothing discussed in executive coaching is shared with anyone, including the commissioning company.
Do you offer seminars or open courses?
No. I run no open seminars, no courses with a fixed curriculum, and no certifications. There are no teaching materials and no examinations. My work takes place exclusively within a company’s mandate, on that company’s specific situation, and its content follows from that situation.
Tom Klein
Schwalbacher Str. 36
65307 Bad Schwalbach, Germany
VAT no.: DE 164380197
Contact
Tom Klein
Tel +49 172 6711284
mail@tomklein.de
© 2026 Tom Klein