For the consequential work
that doesn’t have a playbook.
Auchenglen is led by James Vivian, a former management consultant and senior operating executive who has repeatedly helped organizations move through difficult, unfamiliar, and high-stakes work.
Working where strategy, execution, and uncertainty meet.
James is sought out when organizations need to move before every answer is clear.
Across consulting, operating, transformation, and business leadership roles, his work has often started in the same place: a consequential business need, no established playbook, fragmented ownership, and a leadership team that needs progress before the organization has fully worked out how to deliver it.
James spent more than a decade at Dow Jones & Company, where he was SVP, Head of Business Management for a $1B+ global division spanning data, media, news, and events. Under his watch, the division delivered 17% year-on-year EBITDA growth, with all business lines returning to profitability.
As a senior transformation executive, James led company-wide modernization work across an organization of more than 7,000 people, removing significant operating cost and aligning the business around a new strategy and operating model.
His work at Dow Jones also included helping build a new consumer division, supporting major integration work, and working in the Office of the Chief Executive on enterprise strategy, planning, and governance.
The common thread through these results was leading the organization through new and uncharted circumstances: the first major investment in a flagship product for a decade; defining and leading the firm’s global Covid response; and developing a completely new approach to the legacy newspaper. James’s ability to balance strategic clarity with the structure needed to push the details forward repeatedly helped Dow Jones move into unfamiliar territory.
Before Dow Jones, James was a Principal Consultant in London and New York, advising senior executives across industries including media, financial services, and construction. He also helped launch a US consulting business from zero, building client relationships, growing the delivery team, and creating credibility and operating momentum in a new market.
That consultant-executive combination matters. James has the consultant’s commercial discipline and flexible toolkit, but also the relational judgment and pragmatic focus of someone who has owned difficult work inside large organizations, where priorities compete, institutional memory is thin, teams are overloaded, and good strategies stall unless someone creates the structures for execution.
Auchenglen
Auchenglen was built for the same kind of work: moments when something important needs to happen, but the organization does not yet have the structure, plan, capacity, or confidence to make it real.
Today, James works with CEOs, CFOs, COOs, divisional leaders, and senior teams on consequential work that needs to move but isn’t: stalled transformations, post-acquisition integration, operating model redesign, project remediation, capital and capacity reallocation, and growth initiatives that need stronger execution.
Background
James earned a Bachelor of Laws from the University of London, SOAS. He has also served as president and board member of a community rugby club since 2020.
Structure, alignment,
and momentum.
Auchenglen is built for moments when important work is under-structured, cross-functional, and exposed. The work starts by creating the conditions for progress.
Senior judgment applied directly.
Auchenglen is built around experienced, principal-led work. You get a senior operator in the room: diagnosing the issue, shaping the path, creating the cadence, and helping the team move.
Structure before motion.
When work is ambiguous, speed alone is not enough. We help leaders clarify the problem, the decisions, the ownership, the trade-offs, and the measures of progress, so the organization knows how to move.
Momentum that survives handoff.
The goal is not dependency. We build the operating rhythm, governance, and confidence required for internal teams to carry the work forward after the engagement ends.