Damien M. Power
I build operating cadences in large, complex organizations: the kind that let executives decide faster, give teams clarity about what's theirs, and compress over time as they succeed.
Senior leadership roles where the operating system is the work.
Director, Senior Director, VP, or Chief of Staff (depending on the org), where the work is building or rebuilding the operating systems that let large organizations make better decisions and move faster.
The scope I'm targeting includes owning an operating cadence end-to-end, partnering directly with an executive (CEO, COO, or business unit head), and leading cross-functional work that crosses at least two functional boundaries.
The companies I'm targeting fall into two groups: tech and financial services firms at enterprise or growth scale, and established global brands undergoing operating-model transformation. NYC-based or remote, with real openness to travel-heavy roles.
I'm most interested in problems that are still being defined, where the cadence doesn't exist yet, or where the ones that exist no longer fit the purpose.
What I've been thinking about lately.
What the work has actually looked like.
The COVID Remote Pivot
Verizon's Consumer customer service organization had 18,000 people, most of whom were frontline agents, with roughly 80% working in physical call centers. A remote transition was on the five-year roadmap. On March 13, 2020, that timeline collapsed to 11 days. The SVP I served had to make sequenced, high-stakes decisions across IT, security, logistics, HR, and culture — most of them irreversible, all of them under public scrutiny — while her VPs ran the actual execution and her own calendar filled with C-suite and board demands.
My role was the operating cadence, not the execution. I built the information architecture that let the SVP make the right call at the right moment without becoming the bottleneck. That meant deciding what reached her desk, in what form, and when. It also meant deciding what didn't. I sequenced the work into phases the team could actually run: secure access first (beacons), then hardware and ergonomics, then culture and feedback, then long-term strategy. Each phase had a named VP owner, a daily checkpoint, and a clear handoff. I wasn't the IT lead provisioning laptops or the ops lead reconfiguring call routing. I was the air traffic control for the decisions those leads needed from the SVP.
Two daily standups at the start, compressed to one within a few weeks, then weekly as the system stabilized. Each standup ran on a fixed structure: status from the VP whose phase was active, two or three decisions surfaced for the SVP, blockers escalated by name. I held a separate prep with each VP's team before they saw the SVP, which served two purposes: it gave them air cover when they weren't ready, and it gave the SVP cleaner inputs when they were. The cadence is what made 11 days possible. Without it, every decision would have routed through inboxes and one-off meetings.
The transition completed in 11 days without significant service disruption. The cadence I built outlasted the crisis: the daily-then-weekly rhythm became the operating system the team used through the rest of 2020 and into the Get Healthy campaign that followed. The SVP's standing in the C-suite strengthened materially, as the customer service organization was the biggest operational bright spot — in terms of customer wait times and agent occupancy — during a financial slump immediately afterward.
I'd protect the VP teams harder, earlier. In the first 72 hours I triaged briefings on urgency alone: what was important and time-sensitive went straight to the SVP. I hadn't yet built the prep-before-meeting pattern that would have let me also triage on readiness, so a few items reached her before the owning team had time to shape them. The teams took unnecessary heat for that. By day four, the pattern was in place and we could "punt" items that needed more time, but it should have been there on day one. That's a CoS judgment call I learned in real time, and one I'd make differently from the start now.
Recovering $24M in Controllable Shrink
Coming out of COVID, controllable shrink across the customer service organization had ballooned. Trainings and meetings — time agents spent off the phones for reasons the business could manage — had grown sharply during the pandemic for legitimate reasons: the organization was reorganizing in real time, and the cadence of all-hands and skill-building had been the glue holding a newly-remote workforce together. By 2022 those reasons had largely expired, but the elevated shrink levels hadn't. Leadership was looking at a single bloated number and treating it as a cost problem rather than an accountability problem.
The work split into two pieces: making the problem legible, and then using the legibility to move field behavior. The first piece was reporting. I built shrink reporting that broke the single number apart by category, by site, and against pre-COVID baselines — so the conversation could shift from "shrink is too high" to "controllable shrink in trainings-and-meetings is X percentage points above 2019, concentrated in these markets." The second piece was using the reporting to drive a mandate. I worked closely with my VP to set new caps on training-and-meetings shrink, anchored to pre-COVID norms. The reporting then made outliers visible at the site level. We opened structured dialogues with field leadership on the outliers over the cap — not punitive, but documented and persistent. Once the mandate was set and the data was shared transparently, the field largely self-corrected.
Weekly shrink reporting to the VP layer, with category-level breakdowns and outlier flags. Monthly review at the SVP level, paired with the OV process I was running with finance, so labor recovery and labor planning were always in the same conversation. The cadence ran for a full quarter before the numbers stabilized at pre-COVID levels.
Controllable shrink returned to pre-COVID levels within a quarter. The recovered capacity translated to $24M in labor cost savings and 1.4M additional customer calls handled annually from existing headcount. The work also surfaced a structural insight: the time-tracking taxonomy had grown to 755 codes, many of them functionally redundant, and the sprawl was quietly enabling rep-level break creation in ways the field couldn't easily see. That finding became the foundation for a follow-on project to consolidate the taxonomy to 55 codes, work I scoped and handed off as I rotated into a retail sales role.
I'd have started the reporting six months earlier. The shrink growth was visible in the data through most of 2021; what was missing was someone willing to break the number apart and force the conversation. I treated the reporting build as a 2022 priority because that's when leadership asked for it, but the case for doing it sooner was already there. The lesson I took from it: when you can see a problem the organization isn't yet looking at, the reporting is the intervention. Waiting for the ask costs you quarters.
The Pixel Ambassador Program
Verizon had secured exclusive U.S. carrier rights to launch Google's first two Pixel phones, but Google was entering a market where Apple and Samsung dominated retail attention, marketing budgets, and rep familiarity. The standard playbook for OEM launches at Verizon was volume-based: negotiate a pool of devices, distribute them proportionally across districts and stores, assign them to reps whose upgrade cycles lined up. It produced broad coverage and shallow advocacy. For Pixel 1, that approach delivered modest sales — defensible, but nowhere near what Google needed to establish a third flagship in the U.S. market. Heading into Pixel 2, Google asked for a better program with fewer resources.
The thesis was that a challenger brand without Apple's or Samsung's marketing budget couldn't win by spreading resources thin. It had to concentrate them: pick a small cohort of high-performing reps in the right stores, give them deeper product fluency than their peers, and equip them with direct lines to the OEM that Apple and Samsung reps didn't have. I designed the Pixel Ambassador program (PhG) around that principle. The hardest part wasn't the program design. It was the cross-functional approval. An OEM-specific incentive program at a carrier the size of Verizon raised real questions across Legal, Ethics, HR, and Compensation. I led that approval cycle end-to-end, and the program shipped with structures that satisfied each function without diluting the concentration that made the thesis work.
A persistent chat channel between Google and the PhG cohort, so reps had real-time access to Google product managers for customer questions, feature explanations, and competitive positioning. Monthly performance reviews on the cohort, with sales mix and attach rates tracked against control stores. Direct touchpoints between Google and the field that Verizon's normal OEM relationships didn't include — culminating in flying the top-performing PhGs to Mountain View for the Pixel 2 launch event, where they sat front row and received an on-stage shoutout from Google's SVP of Platforms and Devices.
Participating stores delivered roughly a 20% sales lift over control stores during the Pixel 2 cycle, validating the concentrated-leverage thesis: a challenger brand had outperformed broader spend by going narrower and deeper. The more durable outcome was structural. The PhG model became a proof point inside Verizon for how the company could create asymmetric value for its smaller OEM partners — and Verizon used that model directly as leverage in subsequent negotiations with Apple, packaging the white-glove treatment as a "relationship manager" function and creating three named positions to manage Apple, Samsung, and Google. A program designed to help a challenger compete became infrastructure the carrier used to renegotiate its terms with the dominant player in the category.
I'd have built the measurement infrastructure into the program from day one rather than retrofitting it. The 20% lift number is real and was rigorous enough to defend internally, but the comparison to control stores was assembled after the fact from store-level sales data, and a cleaner pre/post and treatment/control design would have made the result both faster to surface and harder for skeptics to discount.
The practical purpose of operations work is to give people clarity about what's theirs so they can take pride in it.
Most people, at every level, want to be proud of what they do — and the thing that most often gets in the way is not knowing what their own contribution actually is. They know the work they do; they don't always know what it uniquely sets up that makes the end product theirs.
The cadences I build (workflow maps, charters, and operating reviews) aren't there to expose bad actors. They're there to let everyone show up as their best actor. When the structure works, people defend their own lane, surface their own gaps, and deliver work they can stand behind. When it doesn't, I'll be the first to delete it, even if it's mine.
Diagnose the system before you change it.
When I walk into a team that isn't delivering, my first 30 days are almost entirely observation and structured conversation. Two meetings a week with each direct report — one mine, one theirs — and a shared exercise to map what each person actually does, where it goes when it leaves them, and what happens when it's done well. The first artifact is usually a workflow map produced collaboratively at the end of week two. The map's job isn't just clarity. It's redistributing credibility.
Information withholding is almost always a response to a broken cadence.
When VPs hold back numbers, or finance hides its pressure, or a team shows up to a meeting unrehearsed, it's almost never about character. It's about a system that punishes early disclosure or rewards strategic silence. The fix is rarely a conversation about openness. It's a redesign of the cadence so that disclosure becomes the easier path.
Build cadences to be deleted.
The best cadences I've built are ones that compressed over time: monthly meetings become async exchanges, weekly standups become Slack updates, multi-step approvals collapse to one signature. I don't measure cadence health by whether it's still happening or how long it endured; I measure it by whether it's still earning its place. When the answer is no, the cadence comes out.
Pushing back on an executive isn't a confrontation; it's a request to do the work that proves or disproves them.
The leaders I've worked best for treated my challenges as analytical assignments, not insubordination. The point of pushback is rarely to win a single decision. It's to leave the organization with a better lens for the next decision of the same shape. When I built a multi-scenario attrition model, the win wasn't proving anyone wrong. The win was that the organization stopped treating attrition as a single number and started looking at the burnout curve underneath it.
Where my default goes wrong.
The same instinct that produces my best work — building structure that closes ambiguity before it becomes a problem — can produce friction with people who want the ambiguity preserved, not resolved. That's sometimes the right call, especially at executive levels. The compensating move is to read the room before I build, and know if they're asking me to lower the resolution rather than raise it.
How I override my default.
When the cadence doesn't exist yet and the clock is short, the move is sequencing, not structure. In a crisis, I build the lightest possible operating rhythm: a daily standup with a fixed structure, a single decision queue for the executive, named owners for the next 24 hours. Nothing more. The structure can come later.
The through-line is running.
I started as a kid with my parents, medaled in my first 5K in elementary school, ran track through college, and completed two marathons including the Marine Corps Marathon in DC. These days I've traded distance for strength: Mountain Ave in Jersey City Heights is a 115-foot climb, and I run it four times a day. The discipline is the point.
When I travel, I travel for moments rather than itineraries. I've sat with the caldera at Santorini and watched Swan Lake at the Winter Palace in Moscow. Outside of work, I'm a guncle to thirteen niblings, which is its own kind of operating cadence.
The most accurate thing an old colleague ever said about me. I heard some version of that line repeatedly at Verizon, usually walking into a meeting or workshop a senior leader didn't particularly want to attend. The implication was the same each time: if I was involved, something was going to actually materialize. That's the part of the work I care about most.