"Active listening. Shared responsibilities. Pre-planned forgiveness. If the tenets of AlixPartners' co-CEO relationship sound a lot like those of a married couple who have gone through a lot of therapy, well, you're not far off. AlixPartners co-CEOs David Garfield and Rob Hornby were promoted to lead the 2,500-person global consulting firm in February, but previously had worked together for some 14 years, which both say was vital."
""Having prior work experience together makes a huge difference," AlixPartners co-CEO David Garfield told Fortune about sharing the top job with Rob Hornby. "I genuinely believe that our decisions are better as a result of collaborating on them than they would be if we were making them independently." Garfield is based in New York and has decades of experience in corporate strategy, shareholder value creation, and the commercial side of the global consulting business."
"The geographic separation is a strategic advantage for the co-CEOs. Between them, they maintain 20 hours of leadership coverage across time zones-a feat that would be unsustainable long-term for a single CEO. "We're co-responsible for everything," Hornby said. "So we share responsibility for all outcomes for everything. But that doesn't mean that we are equally involved in everything-because we have different expertise.""
David Garfield and Rob Hornby serve as co-CEOs of AlixPartners, leading a 2,500-person global consulting firm after about 14 years of working together. Their partnership emphasizes active listening, shared responsibilities, and a practice of pre-planned forgiveness for decisions made during non-overlapping hours. Garfield focuses on corporate strategy, shareholder value creation, and the commercial side, while Hornby brings experience in AI, digital innovation, startups, and international operations. Geographic separation provides strategic advantage by enabling roughly 20 hours of leadership coverage across time zones. Both are co-responsible for outcomes while dividing involvement according to expertise.
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