Jonah Manning
Two decades sourcing executive and technical leadership for organizations that could not afford to get it wrong. Search & Strategy is the firm that work led to, and the one I still run myself.
Most search firms buy their research.
I came up on the research side. Name generation, competitive intelligence, research architecture — finding the person nobody else surfaced, and then having the tact to reach them in a way that put mission and culture first rather than a job description.
Most partners at retained firms are relationship and business-development people who hand the actual research to someone junior or offshore. That is where searches quietly go wrong: long lists assembled from the same databases everyone else uses, producing the same names everyone else already called.
Finding clients is easy. Finding the candidate nobody else could surface, and getting them to take the call, is the craft. It is what I do myself, on every search.
Where the work has been.
Founder, PeopleOps
Eleven years running sourcing campaigns for technology, media, and venture organizations whose standards were unforgiving — the kind that do not tolerate a long list. Built national and global sales organizations for two enterprise infrastructure companies, one later acquired. Sold the firm in 2019.
Founder, Search & Strategy
Executive and technical search across enterprise software, health technology, aerospace and defense, biotech, robotics, hardware, and gaming. Built a sourcing-as-a-service platform to seven figures in its first year before folding the practice into the firm it is now.
- Core engineering and go-to-market teams built for more than twenty venture-backed companies
- Work contributing to two major exits and three public offerings
- Sourced onto consumer hardware and aerospace programs that shipped at global scale
- A seven-figure book sustained across a decade of repeat retained relationships
You will notice there are no client names on this page.
That is deliberate and it is permanent. The people who most need discretion are the ones worth working for, and a firm that advertises its clients has already told you exactly how it will talk about you. Ask me in the room and I will tell you what I can.
Leaders meet moments. Not organizations.
It is rare to find one leader suited to the entire life of an organization, and rarer still in a multigenerational one. So the question in a board conversation is never who is best. It is who meets this moment. The four types below are not a ranking — each has left a mark on modern history, and each has been catastrophically wrong for a company that needed one of the others.
The missional leader
Rises to a cause. Unmatched when an organization needs belief, a turnaround, or a reason to endure something hard. Less suited to a long stretch of steady optimization.
The mercenary
Tunes the machine. Finds margin and discipline others stopped looking for. Exactly wrong for a company that needed to be believed in rather than tightened.
The go-to-market leader
Moves the top line. Builds the commercial motion and the market position. Can starve a company that needed operational repair before it needed growth.
The product leader
Sees what is not there yet and builds it. Essential at an inflection. Expensive once the inflection has passed and execution is the constraint.
Most failed executive hires were not bad people badly assessed. They were the right leader for a moment the company had already left.
The work does not stop at the signature.
I have watched excellent hires fail because nobody told the leadership team what their mandate was. I have watched unremarkable hires succeed because the CEO backed them out loud, in the room, repeatedly. The difference is almost never the candidate.
Search that ends at the offer letter hands the client the hardest part alone. That is why this firm sells two things — the search, and the embedded execution that makes the search worth having.
Search & Strategy is part of Wells Onyx, a private holding company I founded. This is the firm the group grew out of, and the one I still run myself.
If the hire has to be right the first time, we should talk.
Today you get me. I run the searches I take personally, and I will keep doing that until the bench is deep enough to hold the standard — not the other way around.