Service · both directions

A market you have entered still has to be held.

Registration has a date. Distribution has a contract. The organisation has neither, which is why it is the part that quietly decides whether an entry survives its third year. This is where a Chinese subsidiary stops being a branch of a European company and becomes a company.

Engage us for this if

  • Your local team is in place and the results are not
  • A joint venture needs international standards deployed in a Chinese context
  • Leadership is not aligned and every project is therefore a priority
  • You are designing the operating model before you hire

This is not the right engagement if

  • You want an HR outsourcing provider
  • You want a culture workshop with no decisions attached
  • The problem is genuinely commercial and organisation is being blamed for it

What you get

What the mandate covers.

  • Stakeholder investigation before anyone is put in a room together
  • A facilitated leadership alignment session with a decision as its output
  • Project and talent assessment, with a prioritisation mechanism behind it
  • Governance that survives the consultants leaving — an innovation board, a steering rhythm
  • Operating model and seat design, including where agents now sit in the work
  • Coaching for the executives who have to run it afterwards

“Jumo has demonstrated high capacity to understand international management standards and how to deploy them in the context of a Chinese JV. Jumo has shown high influencing skills and worked at all levels of the organisation, Board and senior management, with high impact.”

Pierre Boulud · Corporate VP, Head of Asia Pacific and Head of Portfolio & Strategic Planning — bioMérieux

The question AI actually raises

Not which tool to buy. What a seat is now.

Most organisations are being sold tools. The harder question is structural: when one accountable person directs several agents, the unit of the organisation is no longer the person — and the chart on the wall stops describing what actually happens.

We are running an ongoing research programme on exactly this, built on primary interviews with agencies and operators in Europe and in China, including company visits in Shanghai. It is being written up as a book, The Systolic Agency. The architecture below is what we now apply when we design a client's local organisation.

One cell Accountable human names it · monitors it · can suspend it ⚡ ⚡ ⚡ agent seats the cell processes locally brief deliverable Cells aggregate Team Department No central bottleneck: each cell computes, then passes downstream. The shared cadence — what synchronises the cells, instead of a chain of command
The architecture comes from a 1978 paper in computer engineering — Kung and Leiserson's systolic array, a grid of cells each computing locally and passing results on, coordinated by one clock pulse rather than a central processor. Applied to an organisation, it answers the question AI actually raises: not which tool to buy, but what a seat is now.
01

The cell

One accountable human plus the agents they direct, with defined inputs and outputs. Every agent seat carries a named human beneath it — the person who commissions it, monitors it, and can suspend it.

02

The states

A seat is human, hybrid, agent-run or suspended — and the protocol that returns it to human operation when an agent underperforms is written before the agent is deployed, not after.

03

The cadence

Cells process locally and pass work downstream. What synchronises them is a shared rhythm, not an escalation chain. That is what makes the structure hold as it grows.

For a life-science client the governance layer matters more than the productivity layer. A regulated organisation cannot have machine work happening outside someone's accountability — and that, not the tooling, is what we help you put in place.

What this costs

From €30,000 a year for a standing advisory mandate; workshop-only engagements are quoted on their own.

Why we publish it

Because you need to know which internal approval route to open before you spend half an hour finding out. A range is not a quote, and nobody has ever been offended by a range. Yours is quoted line by line — named people, day counts — so you can remove anything you do not want.

What you can hold us to

You always know who pays us

Some engagements are fee-only; business development can carry success-linked compensation. Whichever applies, the structure is agreed with you in writing before the work starts and it is in the Scope of Work.

Priced before you commit

A detailed, line-by-line quote — named people, day rates, day counts — so you can remove anything you do not want and benchmark what is left.

A partner replies, not a salesperson

The partner who scopes the work is the partner who does it. Expect an answer within two working days.

All three appear in every Scope of Work. If we are not the right firm for the question, we say so — and, where we can, say who is.

Who leads this

Portrait of Yong Yan

Yong Yan

Partner · Organisational development

More than twenty years of senior management inside European pharmaceutical and Chinese medical companies — with a rotation across almost every function there is, from commercial operations to HR, legal, IT, manufacturing and R&D.

“She always understands the business strategy before talking about organisational development, and provides solutions that truly serve the business — rather than focusing on developing tools, as many HR experts do.”

A chief executive explaining why his company has renewed with Yong Yan for several years and widened her scope each time.

The next step

Discuss your organisation.

Tell us the market, the product and the decision in front of you. A partner replies within two working days with either a scoped, line-by-line quote — or the reason we are not the right firm for it.