The first thing Amara Okonjo does in a first session is tell you what she will not do. She will not read your strategy deck. She will not speak to your chair. She will not, under any circumstances, tell anyone that you are working with her — including the people paying her invoice.
It is a strange opening for a commercial relationship, and it is the entire product.
"Everyone in that building has an interest in what this person decides," she says. "I am the only one who does not. That is what they are buying. It takes about four minutes to establish and about four seconds to lose."
The economics of not being useful
Okonjo's rate is the one quoted, usually inaccurately, whenever European heads of talent complain about coaching fees. She declines to confirm it. What she will confirm is the shape of the work: eight to twelve clients at a time, never two from the same sector, and a hard stop at three years.
The three-year limit is the part her peers find hardest to accept. A retained executive client is the closest thing coaching has to an annuity, and she ends them on purpose.
"After three years I am furniture," she says. "They know what I am going to ask before I ask it, and they answer the version of me in their head instead of the one in the room. That is a very comfortable arrangement and it is not worth what I charge."
What she will not count
She has never published an outcome, and she is unembarrassed about it. Pressed on how a buyer is supposed to evaluate her, she is blunt: they are not, and they should be suspicious of anyone who claims otherwise.
"Show me a coach with a dashboard and I will show you a coach who is managing the dashboard. The honest answer is that you find out in five years, from whether the person is still standing and still recognisable."
It is the kind of answer that sounds like evasion until you notice that the four buyers who have used her longest all say a version of it back, unprompted.
The succession problem
The uncomfortable part of Okonjo's practice is the one she raises herself. In a succession process she has, more than once, been the only person holding confidential material from two candidates and a board that did not know it.
"I decline the second one now. I did not always." She does not elaborate, and the refusal to elaborate is, characteristically, the point.
She is not campaigning for regulation. She thinks the field's ethics codes are written for a version of coaching that does not exist at this altitude, and that the only enforcement mechanism that has ever worked on her is a reputation she can lose in an afternoon.
"There are maybe thirty of us who do this specific job in Europe. We all know each other. That is the regulator."