Speaking & Media
I speak with leadership teams, founders and operators about building operations that hold under scale. Below are the subjects I go deepest on, recent appearances, and where my thinking is published.
I speak about one thing, from many angles: operations that hold under scale. The talks come out of nineteen years of running operations at real size — teams of two thousand and more, hundreds of clients, quality measured across thousands of deliveries — so the material is grounded in what held up under pressure rather than in theory. The aim of a talk is the same as the aim of an engagement: to leave a room clearer about its operating model and what to do next.
The formats vary with the outcome you want. A keynote to shift how a conference thinks about scale. A workshop where a leadership team leaves with a plan, not a feeling. A fireside or panel where the value is in specific, unscripted answers. A longer podcast or interview where there is room to take a single idea apart. Each is shaped to the audience — the talk for a founder community is not the talk for a board — because a session that is built for the room is the only kind worth giving.
This page is written to be useful now, while the list of appearances is still being built. The subjects below are genuine areas of depth, drawn directly from the work; the themes describe the core talks as they stand. As talks, conversations and publications are confirmed, they are listed further down. If a topic matches what you are planning, that is reason enough to get in touch.
01Subjects I speak on
Building a Business Excellence function from scratch
What it actually takes to stand up a quality function that survives scale — the standard, the measurement, and the governance that holds the gain.
When the founder becomes the bottleneck
The operating-model failure that hits most companies between fifty and five hundred people, and the fractional-COO playbook for fixing it.
Quality at scale: from 95% to 99%
Why the last few points of quality are a systems problem, not an effort problem — and how to design defects out across thousands of deliveries.
Using AI in quality control and delivery operations
Where machine assistance genuinely raises the quality ceiling in operations, where it does not, and how to deploy it without losing accountability.
Governance that lets leadership steer
Turning operations into something you can see — trusted metrics, clear decision rights, and an operating cadence that produces decisions, not updates.
02The talks, in more depth
Operations that hold under scale
The anchor talk. Most companies do not fail for lack of effort; they fail because the operating model stops scaling cleanly — decisions back up, quality wobbles when things get busy, and the founder becomes the constraint. This session sets out what an operating model actually is, the few places it breaks first under growth, and the order in which to fix them. It is built to change how a room sees its own operation, so people leave able to name their real bottleneck rather than the loudest symptom.
Building a Business Excellence function
What it takes to stand up a quality function that survives scale — not a checkpoint that inspects defects, but a system that stops them recurring. The talk walks through the three parts that make excellence hold: a defined standard, honest measurement against it, and the governance that protects the gain when volume rises and attention moves on. It is drawn from building exactly this kind of function across thousands of deliveries, so it stays concrete about what is hard: the standard everyone signs but no one keeps, and the measurement that has to be trusted before it is useful.
Governance that lets leadership steer
Operations only become steerable when leadership can see them. This session reframes governance away from the status meeting and toward a working system — trusted metrics, clear decision rights, and a cadence that produces decisions rather than updates. The argument is simple and uncomfortable: most leadership teams spend their time discovering problems they should have been able to steer around. The talk shows what it takes to turn reporting into action, so a team spends its hours deciding, and the operation holds its standard without constant supervision from the top.
Quality at scale, and the honest use of AI
Two related talks. The first takes apart why the last few points of quality — moving from very good to dependable across thousands of deliveries — are a systems problem, not an effort problem, and how to design defects out rather than inspect them away. The second is about where machine assistance genuinely raises the quality ceiling in operations, where it does not, and how to deploy it without losing accountability. Both refuse the easy version of the story. The point is not the tool; it is the system the tool sits inside, and whether it makes the standard easier or harder to hold.
When the founder becomes the bottleneck
The talk most founder audiences feel in their chest. Somewhere between fifty and five hundred people, the habit that built the company — being in every decision — becomes the thing holding it back. Work waits on one inbox, good people stall for want of authority, and growth makes it worse, not better. This session names the pattern plainly and walks through the fractional-COO playbook for breaking it: making decision rights explicit, moving choices closer to the work, and installing a cadence so the business keeps moving without the founder in the room. It is practical, and it is honest about how uncomfortable letting go actually is.
How a talk is shaped to the room
No two audiences get the same session. A founder community at an early stage needs the bottleneck talk framed around their reality; a board wants the governance argument anchored in portfolio terms; an operations team wants the quality material grounded in the work they ship. The underlying ideas stay constant because they are what holds up under scale — cadence, governance, decision rights, quality as a system. What moves is the framing, the examples, and where the emphasis lands. A short brief beforehand on your context and the outcome you want is enough to tune the talk so it earns its place on your programme rather than filling a slot.
03Selected appearances
New talks, podcast conversations and publications are listed here as they are confirmed. To discuss a speaking engagement or an interview, get in touch — I take a small number each year.
04Published writing
All insightsQuestions about speaking
Topics, formats, audiences, and how to arrange a talk or a conversation.
Operations that hold under scale. The talks cluster around a few subjects: building a Business Excellence function from scratch, the founder-bottleneck problem and the fractional-COO playbook for fixing it, quality at scale and why the last few points are a systems problem, the honest use of AI in quality control, and governance that lets a leadership team steer. Every talk draws on nineteen years of running operations at scale — teams of two thousand and more, hundreds of clients, quality measured across thousands of deliveries — so the material is grounded in what actually held up, not in theory.
Several. A keynote for a conference or offsite, where the brief is to shift how a room thinks about its operating model. A workshop for a leadership team, where the goal is to leave with a concrete plan rather than a feeling. A fireside or panel, where the value is in unscripted, specific answers. And longer-form conversations — podcasts and interviews — where there is room to go deep on a single idea. Each is shaped to the audience and the outcome you want; the talk for a founder community is not the talk for a board.
Founders, CEOs and operators of companies that have outgrown improvisation — usually between fifty and five hundred people — and the leadership teams around them. Also PE and VC operating partners and boards thinking about the operating model of a portfolio company. The material assumes an audience that runs things and feels the strain of scale, rather than one looking for an introduction to management. It works best where people arrive with real operating problems, because the talks are built to be useful in the room, not only memorable after it.
Yes — and deliberately so. The point of this page is to set out clearly what Ashish speaks on and how, so a programme chair or producer can judge fit without waiting for a back catalogue. The subjects are genuine areas of depth, drawn from the work; the formats are real options. As talks, podcast conversations and publications are confirmed, they are listed here. Until then, the topics and themes below are the substance. If one matches what you are planning, that is reason enough to get in touch.
Get in touch through the contact page with the essentials: the audience, the format you have in mind, the date or window, and what you want people to leave with. A short exchange is usually enough to know whether it is a fit and to shape the talk to the outcome. Only a small number of engagements are taken each year, so the earlier the conversation, the better. If the timing does not work, it is often possible to point you to the right written piece, or to a conversation that covers the same ground.
Yes. The strongest sessions are shaped to the audience’s real situation rather than delivered off the shelf. That can mean framing the founder-bottleneck talk around the specific stage a founder community is at, or anchoring a quality session in the kind of work the room actually ships. The underlying material — cadence, governance, decision rights, quality at scale — stays consistent because it is what holds up; the examples and emphasis move to fit. A short brief beforehand on your context and the outcome you want is all it takes to tailor the session well.
The written work covers the same ground as the talks. The insights and frameworks on this site set out the operating ideas in depth — the operating model, governance, quality at scale, the makegoods approach — and the case studies put real numbers against them. If you are weighing a speaker, the writing is the most reliable preview of substance and voice: it is the same argument, in the same register, that a talk would make. Start with the published writing below, then follow through to the frameworks for the fuller treatment.
A good operations talk has to be useful in the room, not only memorable after it. The sessions are built to change how people see their own operating model, so the test is whether someone can walk out and name their real constraint — the actual bottleneck, not the loudest symptom. That comes from grounding every idea in work that held up at scale rather than in theory, and from being honest about what is genuinely hard: the standard everyone signs but no one keeps, the authority that is uncomfortable to hand over. The aim is fewer slides and more that an audience can act on the next morning.
Planning a session on operations that hold under scale?