Jeff de Kleijn
Command-and-control structures are failing under conditions of permanent volatility, yet most executive teams still default to them under pressure. Senior leaders are being asked to authorise decisions at a speed and scale their hierarchies were never built for. The real question is no longer how to push change through the organisation, but how to lead one that has to coordinate without being controlled.
Jeff de Kleijn is a former HP and Canon senior executive who helps boards and executive teams rebuild how they lead when hierarchical authority no longer matches operational reality.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Jeff de Kleijn
- Two decades inside HP and Canon across Asia Pacific and Europe, including running HP’s Large Format Printing business for APJ, gives him operating credibility with senior leaders who have lived through global restructures.
- Works fluently across Western systems thinking and Chinese strategic philosophy, useful for European and US executive teams navigating Asia exposure without simplifying it.
- Frames leadership as an operating system question, where decision rights, rhythm and supervisory clarity are the variables, not personality or style.
- Brings a working executive’s vantage point through his current role leading Dilaco, so the room hears a peer, not a retired commentator.
Biography highlights
- Former General Manager, Large Format Printing Division, HP Asia Pacific and Japan.
- Senior executive roles at Canon across Europe and Asia.
- Chief Executive of Dilaco Group since 2019.
- Founder of Cortlandt Gulch, his leadership advisory and writing platform.
- Forthcoming book, Postmodern Leadership: Navigating Crises and Complexity in the Information Era.
- Trained in theatre and improvisation at the Bruges Conservatory of Music & Arts; works in English, Dutch and Chinese.
Biography
Most large organisations are still wired to push decisions up and instructions down. That structure is breaking against the speed and interdependence of the systems leaders now operate in. Jeff de Kleijn’s work begins from that mismatch, and from the specific question of how senior teams behave once they accept it.
His authority on the subject is operational, not theoretical. He spent two decades in senior roles at HP and Canon, including running HP’s Large Format Printing business across Asia Pacific and Japan, before taking over Dilaco, a Belgian IT services group, in 2019. The throughline is leading commercial organisations through restructure, geographic complexity and technology shifts while the formal authority structure was always slightly behind events.
He writes and advises through Cortlandt Gulch, and is finishing a book, Postmodern Leadership: Navigating Crises and Complexity in the Information Era, that sets out his core argument. Power inside large organisations has already moved from position to network connectivity. The leaders who are getting traction are the ones rebuilding their operating rhythm, supervisory cadence and decision rights around that fact, rather than working harder inside the old chart.
What he brings to a room is the combination of a sitting executive’s vocabulary, exposure to both European and Asian operating cultures, and a stage discipline shaped by training in theatre at the Bruges Conservatory. Senior audiences leave with a sharper view of where their own authority architecture is misfiring, and a vocabulary for fixing it.
Key speaking topics
- Networked and decentralised leadership
- Decision rights and supervisory clarity in complex organisations
- Leadership operating models under systemic uncertainty
- AI as an institutional, not technological, force
- Eastern and Western strategic thought in executive practice
- Restructuring and post-transformation leadership
Ideal for
- Boards and executive committees redesigning how authority and decision rights operate post-restructure
- CEOs and group MDs of multi-region businesses with significant Asia exposure
- Private equity portfolio leadership teams under pressure to operate with fewer layers
- Transformation and strategy leads working on the leadership operating model, not just structure
Audience outcomes
- A clearer read on where their current authority structure is the bottleneck, not the workload
- Specific language for separating control, coordination and supervision as distinct leadership tasks
- A working frame for combining Western strategic analysis with Chinese strategic thinking in real decisions
- A more honest internal conversation about what their organisation actually needs from its top team
Talks
A working session on how chief executives rebuild operating rhythm and decision rights when the environment refuses to settle.
Key takeaways:
- Where conventional executive cadence breaks under continuous disruption
- The difference between resilience as a culture claim and resilience as an operating design
- Practical moves a CEO can make inside the next quarter to reduce escalation load
A senior-audience talk on what European and US executive teams gain from taking Chinese strategic thinking seriously, beyond cliché.
Key takeaways:
- The specific blind spots in Western strategy doctrine when conditions are non-linear
- How classical Chinese strategic concepts map onto modern boardroom decisions
- What this changes about how leaders set objectives, sequence moves and read competitors
A direct argument that the old organisational chart is now the binding constraint, with a model for what replaces it.
Key takeaways:
- The operating signs that a hierarchy has stopped doing useful work
- How fluid, self-organising structures actually get supervised
- The role of senior leaders once they are no longer the central decision node