At Tripitakka, the search for leaders who embody resilience, resonance, and the irreducible human

Jean-Michel Wu has built a career out of noticing the fault lines others prefer to ignore. As the founder of Tripitakka, a consultancy dedicated to leadership search and cultural transformation, Wu sits at the intersection of people, performance, and purpose.

His work, as he describes it, is not measured by titles or headcounts but by impact — “placing transformational leaders, building trust within executive teams, and helping organisations evolve through the people they choose to empower.”

That shift was born of discontent. Wu recalls the moment he left the corporate world, realising that “too much of my time was spent sustaining internal structures, rather than creating real change”.

Tripitakka became the vessel for that pivot, one that would resist the transactional nature of traditional search firms. He retrained in coaching, immersed himself in models such as the Enneagram, and built a practice that privileges clarity and chemistry over mere placement.

The work, in essence, is cultural translation. “I ensure that the leaders hired are not only technically strong, but also deeply aligned with the values and vision of the business,” Wu says. “It is not about services. It is about creating clarity, chemistry, and long-term cultural impact.”

Culture as clarity

This framing of culture avoids the vacuity of corporate slogans. Wu does not deal in platitudes. For him, culture is intentional, never generic. “It should reflect what the business stands for, how it wants to behave, and who it wants to attract,” he insists.

Early in his career at Ogilvy, that intent was palpable. David Ogilvy’s principles, though the man was long gone, persisted as daily canon — respect for craft, pride in difference, and an almost religious demand for excellence.

Later, at boutique firm Grace Blu, Wu saw another version of cultural clarity: a small team governed not by scale but by trust, integrity, and a commitment to “doing the right thing” for clients and each other.

Both experiences shaped his conviction that culture must be modelled consistently at the top, whether by a visionary founder or a cohesive leadership team.

It is this belief that informs his caution around leadership misalignment. “One of the biggest cultural challenges I have seen is misalignment at the leadership level,” he explains. Avoidance of hard conversations slows everything down; conversely, a domineering leader who decides unilaterally might generate initial excitement but ultimately corrodes trust.

Wu recounts a startup undone by charisma and impulse, as well as the once-cohesive McCann faltering after its global CEO’s departure. Even WPP, propelled for decades by Sir Martin Sorrell’s force of personality, struggled to find its footing without him. The lesson is stark: charisma does not scale, alignment does.

That is why Wu insists leadership is not breadth but depth. “The fewer people you manage, the deeper your impact can be,” he says, rejecting the equation of seniority with headcount. His consultancy remains intentionally small, because the act of managing people is, in his words, “something sacred”.

It requires presence, patience, and emotional investment — qualities he argues many managers lack because their promotion is tied to past performance, not readiness to steward growth. Here, Wu’s voice hardens into critique: Leadership should not be conferred by default. “If you are not ready to take it seriously, you should not take it on at all.”

Leading beyond automation

The urgency of these convictions sharpens against the backdrop of industry upheaval. Wu sees generative AI accelerating automation across creative and media industries, hollowing out middle layers.

What will remain, he argues, is the irreducible human: connection, discernment, trust. “The future of leadership in this industry will require far more emotional intelligence, cultural awareness, and relational depth,” he says. Executive search, too, must evolve beyond tick-box briefs into deeper excavation of values, psychology, and resilience.

This is what he now offers global clients like Omnicom: not names on a shortlist but the scaffolding of leadership architecture. “It is about designing leadership that can hold complexity, drive change, and create cohesion,” Wu explains.

AI may reorder the bottom, but at the top, where decisions reverberate across markets and cultures, the premium on human connection only rises.

And yet, for all the talk of systems, Wu’s hope does not spring from institutional reform. It resides in smaller spaces: “the one-to-one work I do, the growth I see in clients, the reflections of my children.”

He admits he does not draw hope from global headlines — “some of the least self-aware people are the ones with the most power” — but finds grounding in gratitude, in resisting the endless chase for more.

It is a reminder that culture, like leadership, begins in presence. Less noise. More depth. The lesson Wu leaves us with is not an ending but an aperture: that the most profound cultural change may not come from the stage of a global boardroom but in the quiet investment of one person holding space for another.