Worked with and taught at
The keynote
Planted or Buried
One talk, told for your room. The core stays; the examples, the angle and the title follow your audience. Right now most rooms ask for the AI angle.
AI takes over tasks. What comes in their place?
In het Nederlands: AI neemt taken over. Wat komt er in de plaats?
AI takes tasks out of a job first. What fills the freed room is not the company’s choice alone. Is someone replanted, in work that asks more of their talent? Or do they stay buried in a job that empties out?
The room AI frees up is a chance to use the talent people bring and rarely have time for.
In their words
The ship was steered by two captains. Frederic delivered a clear report that laid the company’s risks and pain points bare. He raised difficult things in a soft, moderating way while making crystal clear what was at stake, and he taught me to stay close to myself, as a person and as a CEO.
“As a production manager, Frederic challenged me because he saw my potential. His guidance and feedback were decisive in growing to the next level.”
“His strongly developed human compass and emotional intelligence is without question Frederic’s greatest asset. He listens without judgment, enriches intuition with courage, and grounds his advice in psychological insight. No one-size-fits-all. He looks at the full potential of a business in all its dimensions.”
The read
Everyone else looks at the tree; I read the soil.
Walk into almost any company and you will hear the same sentence: we have a people problem. After fifteen-plus years inside leadership teams, I have stopped believing it.
The answer is almost never in the person. It is in the structure around them, which nobody has changed since the work itself changed.
About Frederic
Economist by training. Years as CEO and consultant taught me the other half: how people really work inside a structure.
I have seen companies from both ends. From the top, as CEO, where the plan looks clear. And from the floor, in sales across Africa, the Middle East and Europe and on factory floors in Asia, where you see what the plan does to the people who carry it.
The lesson that stuck came far from home, when I was sure my job was to be the smartest person in the room. It was not. It was to see what each person is good at, and to find the place in the structure where that talent can grow. A group knows more than any one person in it. A clear Core and a clear structure decide whether it gets to use that.
In a warehouse in America, a manager taught me the rest. Ask a man to count the stock and you get a wall. Tell him you have a problem and ask for his help, and you get a person. I have led with the second version ever since.
People call this kind of work corporate anthropology. I came to it from the inside, from years in the rooms where these problems live.
For leaders
The people question is about the tree. The answer is in the soil.
You come in with a question: a person who isn’t working out, a team that stalls, two departments to merge, a next step nobody can name. I start from the other end.
- We start hereThe Corewhere the company wants to go, and the choices that steer it there (the soil)
- Structurethe roles and ties that carry it (the soil)
- You come in herePeoplethe tree everyone judges (the tree)
Nothing starts without an end date and a hand-over. For the owner or unit head of an organisation in transition.
The Sociographer is the instrument I work with. From people’s own answers, it reads which trees they are and whether their soil feeds them, and it maps who turns to whom in a team.
See The Sociographer
The book
You’re not failing. You’re planted in the wrong soil.
I’m writing a book with the same title as the keynote, Planted or Buried.
No date yet. Mail me and I’ll let you know when it’s ready.
Contact
I answer every message myself.
frederic@fredericmerlin.comFor a keynote, it helps to know the month, the city, the size of the room and the language.
For a package, it helps to know the question, the size of your organisation and the timing.