James Rutherford
I'm a strategic advisor and fractional executive. I work with leadership teams on business questions where the answer isn't obvious, and where the strategy can't be separated from what the business is able to deliver.
The settings have varied widely: national retail, defense, healthcare, consumer internet, venture-backed technology. So have the functions: strategy, marketing, product, operations, analytics. Those are the environments where the work happened, not the work itself. What stays constant is the kind of question: important, unresolved, and not answerable from inside one function.
I studied engineering at MIT and business at Chicago Booth, where I concentrated in strategy and finance. My career started in Silicon Valley, and technology ventures have recurred through it since, Ember and VideoShare among them, alongside long stretches inside large organizations and agencies. That is where the instinct comes from for what technology can make possible, and why I tend to see a business problem and its technical options at the same time.
Today I work with leadership teams as a strategic advisor and fractional executive, currently as Fractional COO for two companies in the construction industry.
I use AI daily in my own work, and I treat it the way I treat any capability: useful when it changes a decision, a process, or an economic result.
The settings keep changing. The work doesn't.
Early in my career at Sears, a market analysis I led changed how the company understood the growth runway behind a national expansion plan, and put me in front of the CEO to explain why the number everyone believed didn't hold. In an early internet joint venture, research I helped lead showed that a compelling consumer concept couldn't work without an incentive for the contractors the model depended on. I was recruited back to Sears to help turn a new retail format into an operating business: two pilot stores and more than 350 people built around what the strategy required.
Later, commercializing MIT-developed networking technology meant helping a venture-backed company decide what it should own, what it needed from partners, and what role it could credibly play in a larger ecosystem. On the U.S. Army's recruiting account, the work was reframing a $100M+ program around the complete journey from interest to enlistment, improving lead-to-enlistment conversion by 20%. For a national physical therapy network, it was connecting marketing spend to the revenue it actually produced.
Different industries, different decades, different functions. The same work: understand how the result is produced, test the assumptions everyone has stopped questioning, and get the organization moving on what will create value.
The people who know the work keep coming back.
Nearly every major engagement of my career has come from someone who had seen the work firsthand. A former colleague recruited me back to Sears to help build Sears Grand. Another brought me into the U.S. Army's marketing transformation. My current fractional operating role came from someone who interned on one of my teams decades ago.
I take that pattern seriously. It reflects the only measure of advisory work that matters: whether the people who watched it happen would stake their own credibility on bringing you into a bigger, more ambiguous problem.
Engagements take whatever form the situation requires, and in every case you work directly with me.
Ways to work together →