Our Leadership
Behind every great void is a greater team. Meet the seasoned practitioners who have dedicated their careers to refining the art of strategic non-outcome and guiding organizations toward their full alignment potential.
Maximilian "Max" Thornbury III
Founder & Chief Alignment Officer
MBA Harvard '82 · Six Sigma Black Belt · Level 7 Alignment Practitioner
Founded Strategic Void Consulting in 1987 with a singular conviction: that the most sophisticated organizations were not those that produced the most results, but those that could sustain the longest period of purposeful non-result while maintaining full stakeholder confidence. Built the firm from a single whiteboard session into a global enterprise serving over 400 Fortune 500 clients.
“The moment an organization stops accidentally producing results is the moment true alignment begins.”
- —Leading from the Void: A Strategic Guide to Organizational Non-Outcome — 340,000 copies, 18 languages, required reading at 7 business schools (unnamed)
Preston Hawthorne-Clyde
Vice President, Synergy Operations
MSc Organizational Dynamics, Wharton · Former McKinsey & Company (2 weeks)
Joined Strategic Void in 2008 after a formative two-week engagement at McKinsey & Company, which he describes as 'more than enough time to understand the fundamentals.' His Wharton thesis — 'Synergy as a Noun: Toward a Taxonomy of Things That Sound Like Strategy' — was cited approvingly by a panel that did not read it in full.
“Synergy isn't something you create. It's something you schedule a meeting about.”
J. Rutherford Pennington
Chief Disruption Evangelist
PhD Theoretical Business (self-awarded) · 3× TEDx Speaker
Came to Strategic Void in 2014 by way of a career he characterizes as 'a series of strategic pivots, each more disruptive than the last, none of which resulted in a stable organization.' Holds a PhD in Theoretical Business, self-awarded in 2011 following a 400-page personal manifesto he considers 'equivalent to, and in several respects more rigorous than, a traditional doctoral program.'
“If you haven't disrupted something by lunch, you're not trying hard enough.”
- —TEDx: 'Disruption as a Posture'
- —TEDx: 'What If Failure Was the Product All Along'
- —TEDx: 'Zero-to-One Thinking for Organizations That Stayed at Zero'
Caldwell Ashford-Wexley
Senior Director, Strategic Ambiguity
BA English, Yale · Certified NLP Practitioner
Joined Strategic Void in 2016 following a decade in corporate communications at three organizations, all of which he left 'on excellent terms, with extensive documentation confirming that no one was certain what had happened.' Brings a linguist's precision to the art of saying nothing at all with the maximum possible number of words.
“Clarity is the enemy of flexibility.”
Work With Us
Our leadership team is available for keynotes, offsite facilitation, board advisory engagements, and other arrangements that do not require measurable deliverables.
Work With Us