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The Strategy and Transformation Hiring Index closed Q2 2026 at 39, its highest reading since October 2023. This has been driven primarily by freelance hiring demand in Private Equity, but momentum in Corporate and Advisory is also growing. We’ve seen a structural shift in the composition of demand over those 2.5 years, with companies preferring to bring in expertise on an interim basis. A second shift is visible in the mandates themselves: a quarter of the roles that went live with us in Q2 2026 mention AI in the job description, against roughly one in six a year ago.

Fifty people, one former CEO of Xero, Apple Asia Pacific, Ninemsn and Microsoft ANZ. The Movemeon Group brought together a small group of clients, network members and friends of the firm in Sydney for a fireside chat between Steve Vamos and Movemeon co-founder Richard Rosser, introduced and closed by Pete Clifton-Smith (GM APAC, The Movemeon Group), with closing remarks from Richard Whiteoak (MD, Whiteoak Private Equity).

The brief was simple: what does it actually take to lead, and to lead well, through constant disruption? What followed was one of the clearest, most practical breakdowns of the CEO role that anyone in the room had heard.

Meta UK's chief exec (ex-McKinsey, ex-Sequoia) shares a career framework built on rising complexity and expanding influence rather than titles, plus advice to stay close enough to real work to catch mistakes, including bad AI outputs. She ties this to Meta's strategy: WhatsApp agents aim to restore personal trust at scale, AI is expanding jobs rather than cutting them, and targeted fixes beat blanket bans.