2026 March- ESIX New York Roundtable

For our recent ESIX: Executive Search Information Exchange New York Roundtable we were lucky enough to be hosted at the Rockefeller Center by the outstanding Joerg Ziegler and Amanda Lieberman of NBCUniversal. They kindly shared their function's journey from startup to super-sophisticated in 15 years, delivering great results and huge impact, and dazzled us with what is clearly a benchmark function for our profession.

After that, the participants shared what was keeping them up night, for instance, stakeholder alignment, integrating executive recruiting and leader succession, extreme fluctuations in search volume with lean teams but overall there was a general theme of uncertainty and change. Some were going through mergers, some had new CEO's and subsequent restructurings, and there was a lot of talk of change management.

We also spent time discussing how new tech tools—especially AI—are starting to play a meaningful role, including practical use cases like turning search launch call transcripts into interview guides, or radically speeding up search research, helping teams move faster without sacrificing quality or judgment.