The Business Emergency Room: For Leaders Facing Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity & Ambiguity (VUCA)

How much time and momentum do leadership teams lose to conflicts rooted in assumptions rather than actual disagreements?

Maartje van Krieken sits down with Dr. Grant Ballard-Tremeer, author of The Zero-Sum Illusion, to examine the psychological patterns that keep leaders stuck. Grant introduces the “imaginary colleague,” the version of someone we create in our minds based on past frustrations and judgments. Under pressure, these assumptions can turn ordinary disagreements into entrenched conflicts that erode trust and stall progress.

Why do leaders become so invested in defending their own perspectives? And how can genuine curiosity and empathy help break the cycle?

Grant shares practical ways to recognize these patterns, challenge assumptions, and approach difficult conversations with greater understanding. For leaders dealing with strained relationships or organizational gridlock, Grant offers a practical starting point for questioning assumptions and having more productive conversations.

Episode Breakdown:

00:00 Understanding Leadership Friction

09:56 The Zero Sum Illusion

19:51 Recognizing and Addressing Imaginary Colleagues

29:58 Building Bridges in Leadership

Connect with Dr. Grant Ballard-Tremeer:

The Zero-Sum Illusion

Connect with Dr. Grant on LinkedIn

Dr. Grant Ballard-Tremeer is an advisor, entrepreneur, and author who helps executive teams navigate high-stakes conflict and organisational gridlock. As the founder of London-based consultancy E Co., he has spent over two decades guiding international teams through complex, multilateral challenges. In his book, The Zero-Sum Illusion: An Actionable Toolkit to Stop Conflict Winning in Life, Work and Society, Grant tackles the root drivers of team dysfunction, including the "Imaginary Colleague" - the tendency for senior leaders under pressure to manage threatening mental caricatures rather than the actual person across the table. He equips executives to dismantle these cognitive distortions, curb executive attrition and passive-aggressive meetings, and act as thermostats that actively set the climate for high performance.

Connect with Maartje van Krieken:

Connect with Maartje on LinkedIn

Visit The Chaos Games Consulting website

Visit The Business Emergency Room website

Subscribe to The Business Emergency Room on YouTube

Subscribe to Maartje’s Substack

Host Maartje van Krieken is a crisis strategist and decision-making expert who thrives in high-stakes business environments. Combining disaster management training, hands-on experience in global industries, and leadership skills honed as a seasoned sailor, she helps businesses navigate chaos with precision. Whether tackling transformation, scaling challenges, or leadership bottlenecks, Maartje delivers actionable insights to turn turbulence into traction.

Podcast production and show notes provided by HiveCast.fm

The most expensive decision a leader can make during a crisis might be the one they keep putting off.

When uncertainty hits, the instinct to wait for things to settle can feel like the responsible choice. But what happens when the market keeps moving and your business doesn't?

Maartje van Krieken is revisiting this solo episode of The Business Emergency Room because the challenges she discussed when she first recorded the episode in April 2025 have become even more relevant. Business disruptions are coming faster, and the cost of leadership inertia is becoming harder to ignore.

Drawing from her experience as a business crisis expert and yacht skipper, Maartje examines why leaders freeze under pressure and how waiting for certainty can put an organization at greater risk. How do you make smart decisions without all the facts? And how do you keep your team moving when the path forward is unclear?

From recognizing early warning signs to making decisions with incomplete information, Maartje shares practical ways to lead through uncertainty. She explains why declaring a clear direction matters before you have every answer, and how bringing different teams together helps leaders identify what they know, what they're missing, and where to act next.

When conditions are unpredictable, standing still may be the riskiest move of all.

Episode Breakdown:

00:00 Navigating Business Storms

02:57 Understanding Inertia in Leadership

05:53 The Cost of Inaction

08:46 Cultivating a Culture of Decisive Action

12:03 Enhancing Situational Awareness

15:08 The Importance of Communication and Collaboration

18:00 Seeking External Support

21:11 Steering Through Chaos

Connect with Maartje van Krieken:

Connect with Maartje on LinkedIn

Visit The Chaos Games Consulting website

Visit The Business Emergency Room website

Subscribe to The Business Emergency Room on YouTube

Subscribe to Maartje’s Substack

Host Maartje van Krieken is a crisis strategist and decision-making expert who thrives in high-stakes business environments. Combining disaster management training, hands-on experience in global industries, and leadership skills honed as a seasoned sailor, she helps businesses navigate chaos with precision. Whether tackling transformation, scaling challenges, or leadership bottlenecks, Maartje delivers actionable insights to turn turbulence into traction.

Podcast production and show notes provided by HiveCast.fm

Your business usually tells you something is wrong long before the numbers catch up.

Customers go quiet. Referrals slow down. Sales cycles stretch. Teams start questioning the dashboard. These signals may seem small, but they often point to a bigger problem that leadership has yet to name.

John “JR” Ross joins Maartje van Krieken to talk about how leaders can read the market more clearly and catch trouble earlier. Drawing on his experience at PepsiCo, PosiGen, and JDR Growth Advisory, JR explains why customer behavior can reveal problems long before they reach the boardroom.

Where should leaders look first? Often, the answer is in the customers who have not left but are becoming less engaged. Their behavior can expose weaknesses in the value proposition, customer experience, product, distribution, or the way the company understands its market.

Those signals can reveal internal problems too. Are leaders aligned on the biggest issue to solve? Does everyone trust the data? Are teams working in silos when the real problem crosses departments? Growth can hide these cracks for a long time.

The takeaway: pay attention earlier. Talk to the customers who are quietly disengaging, look closely at the data your team no longer trusts, and act on what you learn before the cost of waiting gets higher.

One simple question can reveal a lot: Who is your company’s most successful customer, and would every team give you the same answer?

Episode Breakdown:

00:00 Customer Silence as an Early Warning Sign

05:31 How to Spot Market Signals Before a Crisis

10:09 Leadership Alignment and the “Room Problem”

14:30 What Happens When Leaders Stop Trusting the Data

18:53 The Cost of Delayed Business Decisions

31:08 How to Identify Your Most Valuable Customer

Connect with John Ross:

Connect with John on LinkedIn

Subscribe to John’s Substack

John D. Ross, who goes by ‘J.R.,’ has spent twenty years in rooms where the numbers stopped cooperating for growth brands.

At PosiGen he led growth and strategy while the company scaled to 36,000 customers across 15 states and $375M in home services revenue. Before that, nearly a decade at PepsiCo, including Global Director of Customer Partnerships and Chief of Staff to the CMO. Today he runs JDR Growth Advisory out of New Orleans, serving as fractional CMO to growth stage companies between $5-30M in ARR.

His work starts with a diagnosis, not a pitch. Most leaders who call him believe they have a marketing or communications problem. What they usually have is a room problem: three smart people with three different theories, a dashboard nobody trusts, and one GTM question nobody will say out loud. Confusion inside a growth stage business is never harmless. It shows up in CAC before it shows up in the board deck.

He has coached 60+ founders through the Tulane Innovation Institute and The Idea Village, and speaks at SXSW and New Orleans Entrepreneur Week. In 2027, J.R. will begin teaching at Tulane University a class focused on “Strategies for a Career in Entrepreneurship”.

Connect with Maartje van Krieken:

Connect with Maartje on LinkedIn

Visit The Chaos Games Consulting website

Visit The Business Emergency Room website

Subscribe to The Business Emergency Room on YouTube

Subscribe to Maartje’s Substack

Host Maartje van Krieken is a crisis strategist and decision-making expert who thrives in high-stakes business environments. Combining disaster management training, hands-on experience in global industries, and leadership skills honed as a seasoned sailor, she helps businesses navigate chaos with precision. Whether tackling transformation, scaling challenges, or leadership bottlenecks, Maartje delivers actionable insights to turn turbulence into traction.

Podcast production and show notes provided by HiveCast.fm

Q4 has a way of exposing every business vulnerability you hoped could wait until next year.

Most leaders know where the weak spots are. The team is already tired.A key person holds too much responsibility or critical knowledge. A strategic issue keeps showing up on the agenda without getting resolved. A major client or supplier relationship has gone too long without a meaningful conversation. The real question is whether you address those warning signs now or wait for Q4 pressure to expose them for you.

In this conversation, Maartje van Krieken shares seven practical checks leaders can use to assess how prepared their business really is for the final quarter of the year. Think of them as a preventative health check for your organization. Where is your capacity thinner than it appears? Which parts of the business depend too heavily on one person? What problem needs fresh eyes? And what conversation does everyone know needs to happen before year end?

Resilience comes from catching signals early enough to act. You do not need to tackle all seven checks at once. Maartje suggests choosing the three that make you most uncomfortable and starting there.

If something went seriously wrong in your business in the next 90 days, would you see it coming soon enough to respond?

Episode Breakdown:

00:00 How to Prepare Your Business for Q4

03:22 Check Employee Capacity and Burnout Risk

05:15 Identify Key Person Risk in Your Business

06:20 Address Stalled Strategic Priorities

08:03 Use Fresh Perspectives to Solve Business Problems

10:10 Strengthen Strategic Client and Supplier Relationships

13:38 Review Cash Reserves and Financial Risk

15:50 Have the Leadership Conversations You’ve Been Avoiding

18:31 Choose Your Top Three Business Resilience Priorities

Connect with Maartje van Krieken:

Connect with Maartje on LinkedIn

Visit The Chaos Games Consulting website

Visit The Business Emergency Room website

Subscribe to The Business Emergency Room on YouTube

Subscribe to Maartje’s Substack

Host Maartje van Krieken is a crisis strategist and decision-making expert who thrives in high-stakes business environments. Combining disaster management training, hands-on experience in global industries, and leadership skills honed as a seasoned sailor, she helps businesses navigate chaos with precision. Whether tackling transformation, scaling challenges, or leadership bottlenecks, Maartje delivers actionable insights to turn turbulence into traction.

Podcast production and show notes provided by HiveCast.fm

Serial entrepreneur Rick Mekdessie sold uGov Systems, watched the deal nearly collapse at the last minute, and learned within six months of closing that private equity had already bought his company out from under the buyer he trusted.

Rick joins Maartje van Krieken on The Business Emergency Room to talk about what actually happens after the champagne runs out. He built eGov Systems around a strange gap in Louisiana tax law, took it through a near-collapsed sale, and then watched the company he'd handed off get bundled and flipped to private equity without a word of warning. What do you actually owe yourself before you sign an LOI? Rick's answer: do your own due diligence first, line up more than one buyer, and know your number before anyone else does.

The conversation also digs into a mistake Rick doesn't dress up. When he acquired a consulting firm, he kept both identities separate instead of building something new, and the resentment that grew from it taught him more than the acquisition itself did. How much of founder success comes down to timing versus knowing when to walk? Rick argues it's mostly the latter, and he's using that lesson to build his next company smaller, leaner, and on a timeline that actually fits the years he has left to build it.

Episode Breakdown:

00:00 Introducing Rick Mekdessie, Entrepreneur and Investor

03:26 How Louisiana's Tax Law Sparked the eGov Systems Idea

07:13 Why Seller-Side Due Diligence Can Save a Business Sale

13:37 When a Trusted Buyer Sells Your Business to Private Equity

15:56 The Merger Mistake That Created an Us-Versus-Them Culture

21:28 Why This Founder Is Building an AI Startup

27:54 Building Board Trust Before You Ever Plan an Exit

Connect with Rick Mekdessie:

uGov Systems

Email: [email protected]

Rick Mekdessie is the Founder and CEO of uGov Systems, a GovTech company focused on helping state and local government agencies leverage artificial intelligence to improve revenue collections, operational efficiency, and citizen services.

A lifelong entrepreneur and technology executive, Rick has spent more than two decades building technology-driven solutions for government agencies across the United States. His experience spans tax administration, electronic filing and remittance systems, and digital modernization initiatives.

His mission is to help government agencies harness the power of artificial intelligence to operate more effectively, recover critical revenue, and deliver better outcomes for the communities they serve.

Outside of building companies, Rick is big on giving back. He is an active mentor, investor, and advocate for entrepreneurship and innovation. He regularly works with startup founders, university entrepreneurship programs, and economic development organizations, and has served as a judge, mentor, and advisor for numerous startup accelerators and business pitch competitions.

Connect with Maartje van Krieken:

Connect with Maartje on LinkedIn

Visit The Chaos Games Consulting website

Visit The Business Emergency Room website

Subscribe to The Business Emergency Room on YouTube

Subscribe to Maartje’s Substack

Host Maartje van Krieken is a crisis strategist and decision-making expert who thrives in high-stakes business environments. Combining disaster management training, hands-on experience in global industries, and leadership skills honed as a seasoned sailor, she helps businesses navigate chaos with precision. Whether tackling transformation, scaling challenges, or leadership bottlenecks, Maartje delivers actionable insights to turn turbulence into traction.

Podcast production and show notes provided by HiveCast.fm

Every business emergency has a backstory, and it almost never includes a single person who set out to cause harm.

Maartje van Krieken has spent over twenty years walking into organizations mid-crisis, and the pattern she keeps finding surprises people every time. The cause is rarely a villain. Usually a good, capable person lands in the wrong role, holds onto a solution no longer fitting the problem, or sets a pace nobody sustains, while the organization reorganizes around the dysfunction instead of naming it.

In this episode Maartje breaks down five specific patterns she sees again and again: the accidental manager promoted past their skill set, the person the whole team has learned to work around, the specialist who never adapted to working across functions, the leader married to a solution that worked somewhere else, and the high performer whose pace quietly burns out everyone trying to keep up. None of these require bad intentions. What do they cost when nobody says anything?

Maartje makes a case that these patterns are rarely random. They form because organizations reward the wrong things for long enough that the dysfunction becomes invisible, or worse, expected. The turn comes when the cost of staying quiet outweighs the conversation you have been avoiding.

If you recognize any of these situations in your own organization, this episode gives you language for naming them and a real starting point for what to do next.

Episode Breakdown:

00:00 The Real Cause of Business Emergencies

04:10 The Accidental Manager Problem

09:45 The Person Everyone Manages Around

15:50 When Experts Can't Cross Functions

22:15 Married to the Wrong Solution

27:40 The Pace Setter Burnout Trap

Connect with Maartje van Krieken:

Connect with Maartje on LinkedIn

Visit The Chaos Games Consulting website

Visit The Business Emergency Room website

Subscribe to The Business Emergency Room on YouTube

Subscribe to Maartje’s Substack

Host Maartje van Krieken is a crisis strategist and decision-making expert who thrives in high-stakes business environments. Combining disaster management training, hands-on experience in global industries, and leadership skills honed as a seasoned sailor, she helps businesses navigate chaos with precision. Whether tackling transformation, scaling challenges, or leadership bottlenecks, Maartje delivers actionable insights to turn turbulence into traction.

Podcast production and show notes provided by HiveCast.fm

Your business partnership is stuck in a stalemate that neither side will name out loud, and Marina Akchurina explains why filing a simple document could break it open faster than another round of lawyers.

Most business owners have an arbitration clause buried somewhere in their contracts and no real sense of what it actually does. International arbitration lawyer and arbitrator Marina Akchurina joins Maartje to clear up the confusion, starting with a myth that keeps people stuck: the idea that arbitration is slow, expensive, and reserved for massive disputes. She explains how the process works and why the parties themselves control much of the timeline and procedure. Expedited rules, which most people never hear about, can resolve a mid-sized dispute in under a year.

When two parties stop talking directly and communicate only through letters, that shift is one of the clearest signs a dispute has hit an impasse. Marina explains why filing a request for arbitration doesn't mean giving up on settlement. Filing often pushes the parties back toward it.

The two also dig into why arbitration matters so much for cross-border relationships, where neither party trusts the other's home court system, and why a workable arbitration clause is worth checking before a dispute ever arrives. If your business has been sitting in a conflict that refuses to move, this conversation makes the case for using the tool you may already have.

Episode Breakdown:

00:00 Why Businesses Get Stuck in Unresolved Disputes

02:56 What Is Arbitration? A Clear Definition for Business Owners

05:56 Debunking the Top Myths About Arbitration Cost and Complexity

13:48 When to Invoke Your Arbitration Clause During a Stalemate

19:51 Arbitration Timeline vs Court: How Much Faster Is It?

22:04 Why Cross-Border Businesses Prefer a Neutral Arbitration Forum

26:00 The First Steps to Filing a Request for Arbitration

31:59 How to Draft an Arbitration Clause That Actually Works

Connect with Marina Akchurina:

Visit ArbitraLex's Website

Visit Aksconsult's Website

Connect with Marina on LinkedIn

Marina Akchurina (FCIArb) is an international arbitration lawyer and dispute resolution specialist based in Toronto, Canada. She spent 13 years at Cleary, a leading international law firm headquartered in the U.S., before founding her own practice in 2021. She works on both sides of the arbitration table: as counsel representing companies in cross-border disputes, and as an independent arbitrator. She is admitted to practice in Ontario, New York, and Russia and serves on arbitration panels at leading international institutions, including ICDR, SIAC, HKIAC, DIAC, and others. Her work spans energy and natural resources, construction, infrastructure, and shareholder disputes, with a particular focus on matters involving Central Asian, Caucasian, and Eastern European parties. In addition to her legal practice, Marina consults on negotiation strategy and provides corporate training and mediation services through AksConsult. She serves clients across North America, Europe, and Asia.

Connect with Maartje van Krieken:

Connect with Maartje on LinkedIn

Visit The Chaos Games Consulting website

Visit The Business Emergency Room website

Subscribe to The Business Emergency Room on YouTube

Subscribe to Maartje’s Substack

Host Maartje van Krieken is a crisis strategist and decision-making expert who thrives in high-stakes business environments. Combining disaster management training, hands-on experience in global industries, and leadership skills honed as a seasoned sailor, she helps businesses navigate chaos with precision. Whether tackling transformation, scaling challenges, or leadership bottlenecks, Maartje delivers actionable insights to turn turbulence into traction.

Podcast production and show notes provided by HiveCast.fm

Dr. Anu Rathninde shut down a Tesla supplier plant of 5,000 workers during COVID without corporate approval. He joins Maartje van Krieken to unpack why treating your organization like a machine instead of a living system is the real reason most corporate transformations fail.

Anu spent nearly three decades in global operations leadership at Delphi, Johnson Electric, Aptiv, and Johnson Controls before earning his PhD and writing Tackling Complexity. His China story sets the tone: with headquarters unreachable and quarantine closing in, he made a crisis call that landed him in US media headlines and cost him some allies. What does it take to make a high-stakes leadership decision alone, with no backup and the outcome uncertain?

From there, the conversation digs into why leadership transitions and transformations go sideways so often. Anu argues businesses behave less like machines and more like complex adaptive systems, full of people who adapt, interact, and evolve in ways no org chart predicts. He points to research showing roughly 80% of corporate transformations fail despite unlimited budgets and top consultants, and makes the case that the real answer almost never lives in a boardroom. So where does it live? For Anu, it's with the customer and the frontline employees doing the actual work.

Maartje and Anu also cover what he calls success theater, the gap between leaders who perform accountability and those who go find the truth on the ground, plus how favoritism quietly corrodes team trust even when a leader assumes no one notices.

Episode Breakdown:

00:00 Why organizations behave like living systems, not machines

03:40 The COVID crisis decision at a 5,000-person Tesla supplier plant

11:13 Spotting accountability (or the lack of it) in a meeting room

18:04 What led Anu to write Tackling Complexity

25:04 Complex adaptive systems and why 80% of transformations fail

31:36 How favoritism quietly destroys team trust

33:27 Where to find Anu's book and coaching work

Connect with Anu Rathninde:

Visit Dr. Anu Rathninde's website

Anu Rathninde is the president of Aptiv Electrical Distribution Systems-Asia Pacific, the world’s leader in fundamental technologies shaping the safe, green, and connected future of mobility. Based in Shanghai, he leads the multibillion-dollar business and its over thirty thousand employees and two thousand engineers in over 20 international locations throughout Asia.

For over 25 years, as a global citizen, Anu has successfully led large organizations in Asia, North America, and Europe. In Switzerland, he managed P&L responsibility for multiple global business units as the vice president of the automotive group of Johnson Electric. In North America, Anu managed P&L responsibility for Delphi Powertrain Electronics and Sensors business. He previously held senior leadership positions spanning engineering, program management, innovation, business development, and general management in the automotive and industrial business globally.

Anu holds five degrees, including a PhD and MBA and is a guest professor at the School of Business of East China University of Science and Technology. Anu also serves as the chairman of Aptiv Electric Systems Ltd and is the author of the book: Tackling Complexity: Tough-Love Interactions to Navigate Uncertainty, Promote Positivity, and Deliver Performance Excellence

Connect with Maartje van Krieken:

Connect with Maartje on LinkedIn

Visit The Chaos Games Consulting website

Visit The Business Emergency Room website

Subscribe to The Business Emergency Room on YouTube

Subscribe to Maartje’s Substack

Host Maartje van Krieken is a crisis strategist and decision-making expert who thrives in high-stakes business environments. Combining disaster management training, hands-on experience in global industries, and leadership skills honed as a seasoned sailor, she helps businesses navigate chaos with precision. Whether tackling transformation, scaling challenges, or leadership bottlenecks, Maartje delivers actionable insights to turn turbulence into traction.

Podcast production and show notes provided by HiveCast.fm

60% of employees sat on a concern this year because they had nowhere safe to take it, and by the time it reached leadership, it was already an emergency.

Maartje van Krieken has spent decades walking into organizations after things went wrong, and she keeps finding the same pattern. Someone always saw it first. The question is never whether the signal existed. The question is whether that person believed there was a safe place to bring it and whether anyone was listening.

This episode is her answer to that question, five practical tricks for any leader who wants to build a speak-up culture and catch problems while they're still small and cheap to fix. Some are structural, like an escalation system with a named, independent receiver and a guaranteed response window. Others are about creating real psychological safety at work, like carving out ten minutes at the end of a team meeting to name the subject nobody wants to touch, or asking new hires what surprised them about the business before they had time to stop noticing.

None of these require a massive overhaul. They need a simple feedback framework and the willingness to look at your own leadership blind spots. Do people two levels below you know where to take a serious concern? Do they believe it's safe to bring it up? And if the honest answer is no, what does that tell you about what you're not hearing right now?

Episode Breakdown:

00:00 Understanding Organizational Concerns

02:59 The Importance of Signal Detection

06:13 Implementing Effective Escalation Frameworks

09:05 Identifying Frustrations in Leadership

11:55 Facilitating Difficult Conversations

14:52 Utilizing Traffic Light Systems

20:50 Leveraging New Joiner Insights

26:55 Building a Resilient Organizational Culture

Connect with Maartje van Krieken:

Connect with Maartje on LinkedIn

Visit The Chaos Games Consulting website

Visit The Business Emergency Room website

Subscribe to The Business Emergency Room on YouTube

Subscribe to Maartje’s Substack

Host Maartje van Krieken is a crisis strategist and decision-making expert who thrives in high-stakes business environments. Combining disaster management training, hands-on experience in global industries, and leadership skills honed as a seasoned sailor, she helps businesses navigate chaos with precision. Whether tackling transformation, scaling challenges, or leadership bottlenecks, Maartje delivers actionable insights to turn turbulence into traction.

Podcast production and show notes provided by HiveCast.fm

Companies spend $140 billion a year training leaders, yet trust in leadership keeps sinking. Jimmy Burroughes has a different diagnosis: the real problem is leadership friction built into the system your managers work inside.

Jimmy spent years leading in the British Army before bringing that discipline into corporate consulting, working with organizations like Bank of America, Samsung, and Walmart. Then he burned out completely and lost his job, his relationship, and his home in quick succession. What he built afterward challenges a core assumption in leadership development, that capable managers who seem stuck simply need more coaching. What if leadership friction sits in the system around them instead?

On this episode of The Business Emergency Room, Jimmy and host Maartje van Krieken unpack the forty-three friction points his team has identified across organizations, including unclear decision rights and the hidden cost of constant task switching. They dig into why experienced managers keep escalating decisions they already know the answer to, and why adding more process usually deepens the friction.

Jimmy offers a blunt diagnostic any leader can run without hiring a consultant: ask a few people their top three priorities and listen for the pattern. The answers reveal more about leadership friction and organizational health than any engagement survey ever could.

Episode Breakdown:

00:00 Why $140 Billion in Leadership Training Isn't Working

06:18 Signs Your Organization Has a Leadership Friction Problem

10:12 The Real Root Causes of Workplace Friction

13:54 A Real-World Example of Decision Making Breakdown

20:47 Why Adding More Process Makes Friction Worse

22:47 The Hidden Cost of Multitasking and Task Switching

26:38 A Simple Way to Diagnose Leadership Friction in Any Team

Connect with Jimmy Burroughes:

Visit the JBL High Performance Website

Jimmy Burroughes is a former British Army Officer turned global leadership transformation expert and the founder of JBL High Performance. With experience leading up to 110 personnel across European and Middle East operations, Jimmy has translated the precision of military leadership into a practical methodology that Fortune 500 companies around the world rely on.

He has partnered with organisations including Bank of America, eBay, Samsung, Walmart, Fonterra, and SkyCity — designing enterprise-wide leadership programmes that have reached 1,000+ staff in single engagements across 8 countries.

Jimmy is the creator of the "Simplify to Amplify" methodology, which helps exhausted executives escape reactive, firefighting leadership and reclaim significant time, without sacrificing results. His clients consistently report reclaiming 10+ hours per week and achieving measurable performance improvements within 90 days.

He is the author of two books: Beat Burnout & Ignite Performance and Escape the Multitasking Trap, and is the host of The High Performance Leader Podcast, ranked in the Top 10% globally.

Connect with Maartje van Krieken:

Connect with Maartje on LinkedIn

Visit The Chaos Games Consulting website

Visit The Business Emergency Room website

Subscribe to The Business Emergency Room on YouTube

Subscribe to Maartje’s Substack

Host Maartje van Krieken is a crisis strategist and decision-making expert who thrives in high-stakes business environments. Combining disaster management training, hands-on experience in global industries, and leadership skills honed as a seasoned sailor, she helps businesses navigate chaos with precision. Whether tackling transformation, scaling challenges, or leadership bottlenecks, Maartje delivers actionable insights to turn turbulence into traction.

Podcast production and show notes provided by HiveCast.fm