Man, 65, seeks even more chaos. It is the season of good intentions, and I suggest you resolve to send your chaos to someone who can bring it some order. Thirty years of getting difficult things finished, mostly through people who didn't report to me. Now Oxford-based, reading English forty years late and writing on Elizabeth Bowen. Researcher, project manager, chef de cabinet — and the rare part, finisher. Give me a day and I'll tell you where it's stuck. By the hour, the day, the month or the year.
Kevin Ball · [email protected]
What this actually looks like
Your book is late. The manuscript is three-quarters there, the deadline has moved twice, and what's missing isn't words but a plan and someone to hold it.
The archive is in boxes. A life's papers, an estate, a collection — and no system, no catalogue, and no one whose job it is to impose order.
You need a chief of staff two days a month. A founder or a small organisation that needs someone senior to run the things that fall between everyone's desks.
You need a researcher with judgement. A project that needs work done carefully and read intelligently, not merely gathered.
Who I am
For thirty years I ran things inside large organisations — latterly as a senior people and talent leader for global businesses in technology, financial services and telecoms, and as a non-executive director.
I have an MBA, I'm a Chartered Fellow of the CIPD, an EMCC-accredited coach and mentor, a qualified mediator, and a graduate of the Financial Times' Non-Executive Director programme.
Now I'm reading for an English degree, forty years late, and writing on fear and suspicion in Elizabeth Bowen's wartime fiction. The short version: three decades of getting complicated things finished, mostly through people who didn't report to me, now pointed at other people's complicated things that need finishing.
How it works
Start with a day. Give me a day and I'll tell you where the thing is actually stuck and what to do about it — that's usually the hard part.
After that we work in whatever shape suits: by the hour, the day, the month, or on a retainer for whatever period suits you. Rates on asking; terms kept simple until there's something worth agreeing.
Get in touch
If you're not sure whether this is a thing I do, get in touch anyway — it probably is.
Not ready to hand anything over? Watch from a safe distance first — I write regularly on Substack, and turn up on LinkedIn. Subscribing is free and commits you to nothing.