Julian Lighton

Executive Coach The Trium Group

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Julian Lighton is an Executive Coach at The Trium Group and a Silicon Valley-based leadership advisor whose distinguishing feature is that he did the job before he coached it. More than three decades as an operator preceded the coaching practice: Chief Strategy Officer at four billion-dollar revenue public companies, general manager of a services business with its own P&L, a consultant at McKinsey, a senior global sales and marketing executive at Hitachi and Cisco, and a non-executive director and advisor to public and private companies. He now coaches senior executives at McKinsey, eBay, Salesforce, Scopely, Uniphore and Roblox, working from what Trium describes as an operator’s perspective — strategic thinking paired with pragmatic coaching, aimed at turning organisational complexity into something a leader can actually act on. He holds an unusually complete set of coaching accreditations, including both individual and team certifications from the ICF and the EMCC, a combination held by roughly 400 coaches worldwide, and is the author of “Navigating Your Next”, a career-transition book built on more than 250 of his own coaching engagements.

Career Highlights

• Chief Strategy Officer at four billion-dollar revenue public companies.
• General manager of a services business, with more than ten years of P&L leadership and around ten years as a public company C-suite officer.
• Associate partner at McKinsey & Company.
• Senior global sales and marketing executive at Hitachi and at Cisco, both Fortune 100 companies.
• Board director and advisor to public and private companies.
• Coaches senior executives at McKinsey, eBay, Salesforce, Scopely, Uniphore and Roblox.
• One of roughly 400 coaches worldwide holding both individual and team coaching certifications from the ICF and the EMCC.
• Author of “Navigating Your Next: Discover the Career You Want and the Path to Get There”, published through Advantage Books and distributed by Simon & Schuster.
• Forbes Coaches Council member for 2026 and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Professional Journey

Lighton read Law at the University of Oxford, taking a BA and the BCL, and also studied at Université Paris Panthéon-Assas. Law is an unusual foundation for a strategy career, but it trains the two things his later work depends on: constructing an argument that survives contact with a hostile reader, and reading a situation for what it actually commits you to rather than what it appears to say.

He began in consulting, reaching associate partner at McKinsey & Company — the level at which a consultant carries client relationships and sells work rather than only delivering it. From there he moved into operating roles rather than staying on the partner track, and the shape of the next two decades was set: senior global sales and marketing positions at Hitachi and Cisco, two Fortune 100 companies in very different corporate cultures, followed by a general manager role running a services business with full P&L responsibility. That GM period matters to how he describes himself now, because it is the difference between advising on a decision and owning its consequences.

The largest part of his executive career was spent as Chief Strategy Officer, a role he held at four separate billion-dollar revenue public companies — around ten years in a public company C-suite in total. A CSO at that scale spends less time on analysis than on the human problem underneath it: getting a leadership team that disagrees, often for good reasons, to commit to one direction and then hold to it through a quarter that goes badly. He also served as a board director and advisor to public and private companies, seeing the same problems from the governance side.

The transition to coaching was a deliberate professionalisation rather than a soft landing. He trained at the Hudson Institute of Coaching and at Team Coaching Studio, took a Master Diploma in Negotiation from the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Kennedy School, and studied at Oxford’s Saïd Business School. He accumulated accreditations on both sides of the Atlantic and at both the individual and team level: ICF Professional Certified Coach, ICF Advanced Certification in Team Coaching, EMCC European Individual Accreditation at Senior Practitioner level, and the International Team Coaching Accreditation at Senior Practitioner level. Holding both individual and team certifications from the ICF and the EMCC puts him in a group of roughly 400 coaches worldwide. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a Forbes Coaches Council member for 2026.

At The Trium Group he coaches CEOs, senior executives and high-potential leaders, with a practice concentrated on transitions — the first major role, the first hundred days, the move from individual contributor to manager, the shift from functional to P&L leadership, and the particular difficulty of leading global and distributed teams. His client list runs across professional services, established technology companies and startups: McKinsey, eBay, Salesforce, Scopely, Uniphore and Roblox among them, with endorsements from former CEOs at F5 and Cognizant.

“Navigating Your Next: Discover the Career You Want and the Path to Get There” distils the practice into a book, published through Advantage Books and distributed by Simon & Schuster. Its method is drawn from more than 250 real coaching engagements and is aimed at people at any career stage — launching, changing direction in midlife, or redefining goals after reaching the top. The argument it makes is consistent with the shape of his own career: that the useful question is not which job title comes next but what you actually want, what your value is when stated plainly, and which opportunities fit the person you intend to become.

Education

University of Oxford

BA and BCL, Law

Harvard Kennedy School

Master Diploma in Negotiation, Program on Negotiation

Saïd Business School, University of Oxford

Université Paris Panthéon-Assas

Hudson Institute of Coaching

Certified Coach

Team Coaching Studio