Your Career Isn’t Linear: Ashley Stahl on Reinvention, AI & Personal Branding

Your customers are not lying in your surveys. They simply do not know why they do what they do.

The voice you hear when you speak is not the one your team hears.

Most finance teams start closing the month before the month has even finished.

Why Transformation Programmes Fail — The Inner Game of Organisations Most transformation programmes fail because the organisation is quietly protecting the very thing you are trying to change. Cop a copy of my new book NOW: ⁠https://ademolaodewade.com⁠ Turn transformation experience into paid advisory work — Ethos (paid link): ⁠https://agent.askethos.com/refer/nd01w7e2eelw⁠ AI labs pay highly-skilled experts — Mercor (paid link): ⁠https://t.mercor.com/neABb⁠ Build the culture diagnostic deck in minutes — Gamma (paid link): ⁠https://try.gamma.app/f2d4kygskm1h⁠ Zhanna Zhuravleva grew up in Georgia and lived through war as a child, then built her career across Russia, Israel and the UK. She completed two master's degrees — finance and human resources — followed by postgraduate study, and taught finance, management and philosophy at a university in St. Petersburg. She started in industry as a Kaizen team leader and went on to lead HR and cultural transformation across organisations of more than 1,000 people in 40 countries. She is a Chartered Fellow of the CIPD, has run over 3,000 sessions with leaders, and founded Awake Conscious Play, a school of conscious leadership and leadership transformation. Early in her career she ran a textbook transformation — designed framework, defined KPIs, strong governance. Six months later almost nothing had changed. The organisation was not governed by its processes; it was governed by informal power. Everything since has been built on that finding. The 30% improvement in employee satisfaction and 10% reduction in turnover she reports came from no single initiative — a culture hub that put interns and juniors into the improvement process, people partners trained in coaching, and one-to-ones where the feedback actually changed the next decision. In this episode: Change fluency — why transformation is not a project with a start date and an end dateThe "inner game": why a fintech's people-first programme stalls because the tension is giving leaders their identity Three signals that tell you inside a week whether a culture is healthy — quality of disagreement, speed of bad news, and the gap between the official story and the underground story Diagnosis before prescription: the first 30 days run across Ken Wilber's four quadrants, not a rush to launch programmes Three types of values — declarative, conscious, unconscious — and which layer actually decides Why Meta making AI token consumption a performance metric produced engineers burning tokens instead of better decisions WEF Future of Jobs: 170 million roles created against 92 million displaced — recalibration, not replacement"AI is electricity with intelligence" — why this is an electricity moment rather than an internet one The 4D Compass for building trust: self, soul, soft, spiritWhy engagement surveys measure compliance — a purple, tribal culture scores high on engagement and low on trust What she protects if the HR budget is halved: leader development, and a culture diagnosis every year The mistake founders make at 100 employees — still leading as though there are 20Zhanna's recommendation for every CEO is Spiral Dynamics by Don Beck and Christopher Cowan. Her conscious leadership programmes — including Lila, the transformational game she has adapted for leaders and runs offline and online — are at: ⁠https://awake-play.co.uk/⁠ Upcoming cohorts: ⁠https://awake-play.co.uk/upcoming⁠ Connect with Zhanna on LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/zhanna-zhuravleva-chartered-fcipd-03a0a622a/⁠ Hosted by Ademola Odewade — chartered accountant, author of Human-Led, AI-Powered Finance (foreword by Professor Dave Ulrich), and Founder of K-Dems Consulting. The King Dems Podcast. Growth Mindset, Leadership, AI and Business Insights. Ranked in the global top 2% of podcasts. Diary of a CFO. Finance leadership, unfiltered. Ranked in the global top 2.5% of podcasts. This description contains paid links. We may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.

Business valuation isn't a multiple of EBITDA. Cop a copy of my new book NOW: https://ademolaodewade.com Turn expertise into paid advisory work — Ethos (paid link): https://agent.askethos.com/refer/nd01w7e2eelw AI labs pay highly-skilled experts — Mercor (paid link): https://t.mercor.com/neABb Build the buyer deck in minutes — Gamma (paid link): https://try.gamma.app/f2d4kygskm1h Mark Mills OBE started Cardpoint plc from scratch in 2000. Two years later it floated on AIM at a £7 million valuation. By 2006 it was turning over £100 million a year on £19.8 million of EBITDA, and he exited in 2007 at £175 million. He now sells other people's businesses. One owner was told his company was worth £3 million. Mark sold it for just over £10 million. Nothing changed in the accounts — what changed was who the business was presented to, and why they needed it. In this episode: - Why bids from strategic buyers don't resemble a multiple of EBITDA - The £3m-to-£10m sale, and the buyer maths that produced it - Rule one of any business model: recurring income — learned from a payphone business that died in the 1991 recession - How Mark and his CFO reverse-engineered £100m of revenue onto a sheet of paper, then landed within 2% - Why "in three years" is a useless target and "by 31 August 2029" is not - Solving a working capital problem by finding a bank with too much physical cash - The one metric he never ignores when assessing a company for sale - FARM — why people work for Fun, Achievement, Recognition, then Money, in that order - Selling to strangers, and why referrals cannot scale a business - What AI actually changes about client acquisition and KPI monitoring - Realistic exit timelines: 12 to 30 months, not six Mark's book is Making Your Mark: How I Built a Fortune From £1.50 — and You Can Too. He offered listeners a free signed copy — email him at [email protected] with your address and he'll send one out. More from Mark: www.mark.co.uk · linkedin.com/in/markrichardmills Hosted by Ademola Odewade — chartered accountant, author of Human-Led, AI-Powered Finance (foreword by Professor Dave Ulrich), and Founder of K-Dems Consulting. The King Dems Podcast. Growth Mindset, Leadership, AI and Business Insights. Ranked in the global top 2% of podcasts. Diary of a CFO. Finance leadership, unfiltered. Ranked in the global top 2.5% of podcasts. This description contains paid links. We may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. #BusinessValuation #ExitStrategy #DiaryOfACFO #KingDemsPodcast