Grey Matter with Declan Kelly: Inside the Minds of the People Who Move the World

What does it take to keep getting better when you're already one of the best in the world? For Coach Dawn Staley, the answer has as much to do with how you think as how you play.
A four-time Olympic gold medalist and three-time national champion, Dawn has spent more than three decades at the highest levels of women's basketball, first as a player and now as head coach of the University of South Carolina. She describes herself as the ultimate compartmentalizer, but becoming a better leader required her to learn when to set aside the instincts that had made her successful.
In this episode of Grey Matter, Dawn joins Consello Founder, Chairman and CEO Declan Kelly to discuss the losses that still stay with her, the difficult feedback that changed her approach to coaching, and why learning to understand the people you lead is essential to sustained success.
In this conversation, Dawn discusses:
•Why the losses stay with her longer than the victories
•What a bad basketball game reveals about a player's mindset
•The role of pressure and disappointment in her development
•Knowing when a team needs intensity, joy, softness, or composure
•Her routines for clearing her head before a big game
About Consello

Consello is an Advisory and Investing Platform with offices in New York, Miami, Atlanta, Dublin, Belfast, London, Brussels and Abu Dhabi. 

Consello’s distinct advisory practices provide the complete strategic counsel today’s leaders need to grow and transform their organizations. Consello’s advisory expertise spans Corporate Advisory; M&A; Management Consulting; Talent; and Sports and Entertainment. Dedicated teams operate in each practice, led by a leadership group with deep operational experience across industries, business growth stages and market cycles and with an expansive set of global corporate relationships.

Consello’s investment business, Consello Capital, identifies high-potential mid-market companies and invests capital and expertise to transform their growth.
About Grey Matter Host Declan Kelly

Declan Kelly is the Founder, Chairman and CEO of Consello, one of the world's most influential boutique advisory firms. A trusted advisor to dozens of CEOs leading the world's top companies, Mr. Kelly has built or run four global consulting companies over the last three decades prior to founding Consello. Mr. Kelly also served in government as US Economic Envoy to Northern Ireland during the Obama administration.

Twenty years after Setting the Table, restaurateur Danny Meyer has written a new book about the experience of growing Union Square Hospitality Group.

In What Could Possibly Go Right?, he reflects on the years when the philosophy of hospitality that shaped his early restaurants had to become something a much larger organization could understand and put into practice. The book follows the success of Union Square Cafe, Gramercy Tavern, and Shake Shack, but it is also an account of the lessons that came with growth.

In this episode of Grey Matter, Danny joins Consello Founder, Chairman and CEO Declan Kelly to discuss the challenge of maintaining that standard as a business expands, along with the leadership decisions that have shaped his career.

In this episode, Danny addresses:
•Turning hospitality instincts into a culture that can scale
•Identifying people with high HQ and teaching teams to “read signs”
•His 49/51 formula for performance and hospitality
•How a Madison Square Park hot dog cart became Shake Shack
•Why he gave up the CEO title

About Consello

Consello is an Advisory and Investing Platform with offices in New York, Miami, Atlanta, Dublin, Belfast, London, Brussels and Abu Dhabi. 

Consello’s distinct advisory practices provide the complete strategic counsel today’s leaders need to grow and transform their organizations. Consello’s advisory expertise spans Corporate Advisory; M&A; Management Consulting; Talent; and Sports and Entertainment. Dedicated teams operate in each practice, led by a leadership group with deep operational experience across industries, business growth stages and market cycles and with an expansive set of global corporate relationships.

Consello’s investment business, Consello Capital, identifies high-potential mid-market companies and invests capital and expertise to transform their growth.
About Grey Matter Host Declan Kelly

Declan Kelly is the Founder, Chairman and CEO of Consello, one of the world's most influential boutique advisory firms. A trusted advisor to dozens of CEOs leading the world's top companies, Mr. Kelly has built or run four global consulting companies over the last three decades prior to founding Consello. Mr. Kelly also served in government as US Economic Envoy to Northern Ireland during the Obama administration.

Every CEO is being asked to make decisions about AI before there is a reliable playbook for what comes next.
Where to invest. How to create business value. Which risks to take. What to automate. And what should remain fundamentally human.
That makes experience a more complicated asset. The past may offer fewer obvious answers, but the judgment built through years of operating across different environments may become even more valuable.
Few executives embody that challenge better than Sarah Friar, CFO of OpenAI.
Her career has taken her from metallurgy and mining in Ghana to Goldman Sachs, Salesforce, Block, Nextdoor and now OpenAI. She describes it as a series of “zigs and zags,” but each move gave her another reference point for navigating unfamiliar problems and situations.
Today, she is applying that experience inside a company whose economics and capabilities are evolving in real time, while businesses everywhere are being forced to rethink software, talent, cybersecurity and the architecture of work.
In this episode of Grey Matter, Sarah joins Consello Founder, Chairman and CEO Declan Kelly to discuss how leaders make decisions when precedent becomes less reliable, how AI is already creating real business value, and why the ability to distinguish what should change from what should endure may become one of the most important advantages experience can provide.
In this episode, Sarah addresses:
How CEOs should make decisions about AI when there is no reliable playbook for what comes next
Why judgment becomes more valuable as intelligence becomes more abundant
How AI is already translating into real business value, from productivity gains to revenue growth and new operating models
Why the faster an organization moves, the more important it becomes to know what should endure
How a career of “zigs and zags” built the pattern recognition she now relies on at OpenAI
About Consello

Consello is an Advisory and Investing Platform with offices in New York, Miami, Atlanta, Dublin, Belfast, London, Brussels and Abu Dhabi. 

Consello’s distinct advisory practices provide the complete strategic counsel today’s leaders need to grow and transform their organizations. Consello’s advisory expertise spans Corporate Advisory; M&A; Management Consulting; Talent; and Sports and Entertainment. Dedicated teams operate in each practice, led by a leadership group with deep operational experience across industries, business growth stages and market cycles and with an expansive set of global corporate relationships.

Consello’s investment business, Consello Capital, identifies high-potential mid-market companies and invests capital and expertise to transform their growth.
About Grey Matter Host Declan Kelly

Declan Kelly is the Founder, Chairman and CEO of Consello, one of the world's most influential boutique advisory firms. A trusted advisor to dozens of CEOs leading the world's top companies, Mr. Kelly has built or run four global consulting companies over the last three decades prior to founding Consello. Mr. Kelly also served in government as US Economic Envoy to Northern Ireland during the Obama administration.

Larry Fitzgerald is an 11x Pro Bowler and now a first-ballot Pro Football Hall of Famer. Since retiring, he's built a second career as a successful investor, with a portfolio spanning more than 160 companies.
Despite being one of the greatest wide receivers in the modern era, what often gets overlooked is how much his inquisitive mind played in his success, and the discipline to treat the moments that tested him most as turning points for his evolution. That endless curiosity showed up in the way he approached the game, and it has carried into the way he has approached business.
In this episode of Grey Matter, Larry sits down with Consello Founder, Chairman and CEO Declan Kelly to talk about what it takes to keep learning at the highest level, why the hardest adjustments are often the most important, and how the moments that test us can become the moments that move us forward.
In this conversation, Larry discusses:
•Why he draws a hard line between mentorship and sponsorship, and how Dennis Green gave him both
•What Kurt Warner told him early in his career that he initially resented, and why he now calls him the most important quarterback he ever played alongside
•Why he agreed to give up the position that made him famous at the peak of his career, and what it taught him about pride
•How growing up between a sold-out stadium and a hospital ward shaped the way he processes both success and failure
•Why he never once pursued a trade in seventeen years, and what he tells young executives who call him asking whether it's time to leave

About Consello

Consello is an Advisory and Investing Platform with offices in New York, Miami, Atlanta, Dublin, Belfast, London, Brussels and Abu Dhabi. 

Consello’s distinct advisory practices provide the complete strategic counsel today’s leaders need to grow and transform their organizations. Consello’s advisory expertise spans Corporate Advisory; M&A; Management Consulting; Talent; and Sports and Entertainment. Dedicated teams operate in each practice, led by a leadership group with deep operational experience across industries, business growth stages and market cycles and with an expansive set of global corporate relationships.

Consello’s investment business, Consello Capital, identifies high-potential mid-market companies and invests capital and expertise to transform their growth.
About Grey Matter Host Declan Kelly

Declan Kelly is the Founder, Chairman and CEO of Consello, one of the world's most influential boutique advisory firms. A trusted advisor to dozens of CEOs leading the world's top companies, Mr. Kelly has built or run four global consulting companies over the last three decades prior to founding Consello. Mr. Kelly also served in government as US Economic Envoy to Northern Ireland during the Obama administration.

Over the course of his remarkable 26-year career, Mark Messier won six Stanley Cups and remains the only player in NHL history to captain two different franchises to a championship. Few elite athletes have been asked to reinvent themselves as often or as successfully.
In Edmonton, he spent a decade alongside Wayne Gretzky as the team's indispensable second star. When Gretzky was traded in 1988, Messier stepped into the captaincy and led the Oilers to another Stanley Cup two years later. Then he arrived in New York, where he joined a franchise that hadn't won a championship in 54 years and helped end that drought in his third season.
In this episode of Grey Matter, Mark joins Consello Founder, Chairman and CEO Declan Kelly to reflect on a career shaped by constant adaptation. They discuss how he learned to meet the demands of different teams, different moments, and different stages of his career, and why that same mindset matters just as much in business as it does in sport.
In this conversation, Mark discusses:
· The realization at nineteen that led him to train his mind as deliberately as his body 
· How he thought through the Gretzky trade in 1988, and why he changed his role 
· What separates a good teammate from a great one, and why surrendering to the team is the highest form of leadership 
· How leaders hold people accountable without breeding resentment 
· How he weighed the move to New York when the people he trusted told him not to go 
About Consello

Consello is an Advisory and Investing Platform with offices in New York, Miami, Atlanta, Dublin, Belfast, London, Brussels and Abu Dhabi. 

Consello’s distinct advisory practices provide the complete strategic counsel today’s leaders need to grow and transform their organizations. Consello’s advisory expertise spans Corporate Advisory; M&A; Management Consulting; Talent; and Sports and Entertainment. Dedicated teams operate in each practice, led by a leadership group with deep operational experience across industries, business growth stages and market cycles and with an expansive set of global corporate relationships.

Consello’s investment business, Consello Capital, identifies high-potential mid-market companies and invests capital and expertise to transform their growth.
About Grey Matter Host Declan Kelly

Declan Kelly is the Founder, Chairman and CEO of Consello, one of the world's most influential boutique advisory firms. A trusted advisor to dozens of CEOs leading the world's top companies, Mr. Kelly has built or run four global consulting companies over the last three decades prior to founding Consello. Mr. Kelly also served in government as US Economic Envoy to Northern Ireland during the Obama administration.