Executive Advisor · Life Sciences & Biotech
“Start-up performance is driven more by sourcing design than execution effort.”
Caroline E. Jones
Shaping Our Industry · Clinical Trials Sourcing Strategy, 2026
Strategy, operations, and leadership clarity for life sciences and biotech leaders. Stanford and Gilead, on both sides of the table.
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Cycle time
The six months nobody plans for.
Start-up is the longest and least predictable phase of a trial. Most of that time is a design problem, not an effort problem.
What changes
What is different afterward.
Not a report and not a framework. Three conditions that change, and stay changed after the engagement ends.
Timelines you can commit to
Start-up stops being the phase nobody will forecast. Sourcing gets decided at portfolio level, and the cycle times go in the board deck without a caveat.
Change the organisation absorbs
Plans that survive contact with the people who have to live inside them, rather than being agreed in the room and routed around afterward.
Decisions that stop circling
Senior teams that can make the call, because someone in the room has sat on both sides of the agreement and knows where the room to move is.
Engagements
Every engagement begins with the same question.
Is this a design problem, or an effort problem?
Clinical operations and sourcing strategy
Start-up acceleration, sourcing design, vendor selection, and transition management for sponsors running global trials. Portfolio-level design, not study-by-study firefighting.
Project or retainer
Change management in regulated environments
Prosci-based change execution for migrations, vendor transitions, reorganizations, and integrations. The plan is the easy part. Adoption is the question.
Project engagements
Executive advisory
Ongoing counsel to senior leaders. Operating decisions, organizational design, negotiation strategy, and the calls that cannot be made in a staff meeting.
Monthly retainer · Limited availability
Track record
Large-scale change, delivered without stopping the work.
Strategy is easy to describe and hard to hold at scale. This is the scale it was held at.
Presented publicly at Shaping Our Industry, 2026.
Speaking
Operators want numbers, not frameworks.
Most sessions on trial operations stay at the level of principle. These bring the case study, the benchmarks, and the trade-offs it took to get them.
Sourcing strategy and the start-up problem
Why sourcing design at portfolio level moves start-up further than any amount of execution effort.
Replacing a vendor without stopping the work
Sixty-five studies and 1,650 sites in six months. The structure, the real risks, and the noise.
Change nobody routes around
Why change fails on adoption rather than design, and what leaders can do about resistance nobody says out loud.
About
Twenty years on both sides of the table.
I have negotiated for a research university and for a global biotech. I have sat on both sides of the same agreement and I know where the room to move actually is.
Six years at Stanford across medicine, engineering, and law, with signing authority for the Board of Trustees. Eight years at Gilead as Global Head of Clinical Contracts, Pricing and Payments, leading fifty people across eight countries. Before that, semiconductors, a security installation division, and two years running operations for the Air Force at Ramstein.
I like the moment when a room stops performing and somebody finally says the true thing. Most of the work after that is straightforward.
I am also trained in somatic work, which sounds like a departure and is not. Reorganizations do not get resisted in a spreadsheet. People absorb change in their bodies first and explain it later.
MBA · ICF Professional Certified Coach · Prosci Certified Change Practitioner · Trained in somatic practice
One to one
The plan is rarely the problem. What breaks is the space between the plan and the people who have to live inside it.
A reorganisation lands on an org chart. A transition lands on a person. I work with both, often in the same week.
Leaders in transition
Exits, step-ups, and reorganisations. The stretch where the role you are in and the person you are becoming have stopped matching.
One room with no agenda
Somewhere to think out loud that is not your board, not your team, and not your family. Most senior people no longer have one.
Integration, not insight
Insight is easy to collect and hard to keep. Prosci for the plan, coaching for the conversation, somatic practice for what the body settled before the meeting started.
ICF Professional Certified Coach. Engagements run in blocks rather than by the hour, and a small number are open at any time.
Ask about working togetherStart here
Bring the problem you keep carrying into every meeting. Or the one you have not said out loud yet.
If it is not a fit, I will say so and point you somewhere better.
Start a conversationSan Francisco Bay Area · Available globally