Louise Whitehead

Managing Director

Louise's career has followed two main tracks. Between 1979 and 1991 Louise embarked on a number of Sales, Operational then HR and Employee Relations roles culminating in her appointment as the HR director of Beefeater Steakhouses. Working through the acquisition of Beefeater's major competitor Berni Inns, Louise developed a range of valuable skills ensuring that the promised acquisition synergies were realised (despite the long-standing and ingrained cultural values within the two organisations). The painful and, at times, gruelling but satisfying alignment of the two competing organisations and the birth of her first child led Louise to the second half of her career as a consultant.

During the early 90's Louise was engaged to support a variety of Mergers and Acquisition projects with the aim of bringing disparate groups of employees to work together. She facilitated various large-scale change and transformation programmes for a range of businesses and became part of the founding team of an e-learning company called Learn2Earn, where her role was to define and manage the customer interface and relationship to establish a new personal learning system.

Louise started working with her business partner Andy Pellant in 1996 and in 2004 they founded emergentedge, a consultancy operating at the leading edge of thinking, research, coaching and development around Entrepreneurship, Enterprise Skills and Leadership. The pair then created The Authentic Organisation to focusing more specifically on personal and organisational effectiveness and high performance.

Louise is a genuine and very tenacious consultant who loves to enable others to grow and develop their own, as well as their organisations', capabilities and performance. She has a comprehensive business background, having worked for Whitbread, Sears, Rank Hovis and the Burton Group (now Acadia), as well as running her own businesses. Louise's core skills are in the areas of leadership and performance, coaching and effective strategic implementation throughout an employee base. She is able to create flexible solutions from a deep understanding and application of many disciplines. She blends detailed insight with determined, pragmatic yet powerful skills in working with people. Louise's style leads her to challenge her clients to accelerate their own development, their teams and their business.