Silk Road Partners
Founded by Nigel Cumberland and Philip Beddows, the Silk Road has built up a core team of experienced professionals with strong expertise in supporting the careers and development of succesful executives and leadership teams.
They have an extensive global network and are supported by other experts where additional capabilities or resources are required. Biographies of our core team can be read below.
Cristina Grace Krishna Kumar Bonnie Chan
Hélène Seiler Sarah Harley
Nigel Cumberland
For over 20 years, Nigel has worked all over the world with most of the time spent in the Gulf and Asia. As a Co-Founder of Silk Road, he brings an 'east-west' business experience and perspective to the talent and leadership development & performance fields through providing talent management and leadership training, coaching and consulting services for a range of multinational clients. He has helped clients all over Asia and EMEA.
Today he sits on the boards of various companies and not-for-profit organisations in locations as far afield as Dubai, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia. Previously Nigel founded and ran an award-winning Greater China executive search firm called St. George's. Prior to this he had been a regional Finance Director with Coats plc (then a UK FTSE100 company). He has also held senior positions in various other multinational companies including Dalgety plc, Macquarie Bank and Adecco SA.
Educated at Cambridge University (BA(Hons) & MA(Hons)), Nigel is a Founding Fellow of the Institute of Coaching Professional Association (ICPA), a Harvard Medical School affiliate. He is also a Fellow of the Institute of Leadership and Management (FInstLM) and a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (FCMA). He is a member of the International Association of Coaching (IAC) and is certified in various assessment instruments. He writes and talks on various aspects of global talent and leadership development, about which he is very passionate.
Philip Beddows
Philip coaches senior individuals and emerging leaders, typically at critical transition points in their development and/or at key moments of commercial change in their organization.
He has a passion for helping people achieve their full potential in a commercial context and was fortunate to have been trained by one of the pre-eminent Inner Game coaches. He has been working in the coaching arena for over twenty years and he co-founded and led one of the non-search practices of leading UK headhunting firms Baines Gwinner and, after acquisition, Whitehead Mann. From the latter, he helped lead an MBO which resulted in the foundation of BG Consulting Group. His sector experience is very broad, but he has a high level of expertise working in financial and professional services. A richly varied set of life experiences includes leadership positions in the military, political, educational and charitable spheres.
Philip enjoys writing on leadership, succession, mentoring, non-executive directorships & portfolio life, the economy & corporate purpose, and careers; his articles have been published in business, financial and HR media. He was educated at the University of Reading where he gained a BA(Hons) in History and studied French at Université Stendhal-Grenoble 3. He is a Founding Fellow of the Institute of Coaching Professional Association (ICPA), a Harvard Medical School affiliate and is a Member of the European Mentoring & Coaching Council, a Fellow of The Royal Geographical Society and a member of the Next Generation Non-Executive Network in the UK, having been involved since its foundation.
Cristina Grace
For over 15 years, Cristina has worked globally with business leaders to achieve business and professional goals through a combination of strategic advice and supportive challenge. She works with clients as both an executive coach and organisational development consultant, and has a talent for helping individuals, teams and companies to build new capabilities sustainably. Board directors and senior executives work with her to enhance their abilities to lead change effectively, increase leadership impact, and transition quickly into new roles.
Cristina offers clients a broad business perspective, gained from holding advisory and leadership roles across different industries. Previously she was a Partner at Whitehead Mann, a global executive search and leadership advisory firm now owned by Korn/Ferry. She also led private equity firm 3i’s in-house portfolio company board recruitment function globally until 2009, when she founded Grace Leadership Ltd, a leadership consultancy. Her early career was spent in investment banking in the USA, and in strategy consulting with the Boston Consulting Group in London.
American by birth, Cristina has lived in the UK since 1995 after completing an MBA at INSEAD in France. She trained as a coach at the Institute for Human Development (Adrian Gilpin) in 2006, and is certified in a range of psychometric instruments and to NLP Practitioner level. She holds a B.A. (Hons) from The University of North Carolina.
Krishna Kumar
Bringing over 30 years global experience to his role, Krishna works as an Executive Coach specializing in the Inner Coach methodology that uses concepts and practices drawn from sports psychology and organizational behavior to enhance managerial performance in the corporate world. He is actively involved in popularizing the use of coaching as a means of personal and organizational development.
He is a leader in Asia in the Executive Coaching field and is the Founder Director of the Intrad School of Executive Coaching (ISEC), which is a Bangalore-based licensed school of the International Association of Coaching (IAC). He has been a senior management executive, a sports coach, an entrepreneur, a visiting faculty at leading Business schools and independent Board member.
He frequently publishes and has been profiled in leading business magazines. A USPTR certified tennis coaching professional, his passion for sports resulted in the creation of the Kinesis Tennis Academy, an ISO 9001-2008 certified academy rated amongst India’s premier professional tennis institutes. He holds a degree in Engineering from IIT Madras, in management from IIM, Bangalore and an advanced management certification from INSEAD. Krishna is also a Founding Fellow of the Institute of Coaching Professional Association (ICPA), a Harvard Medical School affiliate.
Bonnie Chan
Bonnie is a seasoned executive coach based in Hong Kong. She specializes in cross-cultural coaching, succession planning and personal and organization effectiveness. Her rich business acumen and international trade experiences from over 18 years with Toshiba, HKTDC, Itochu and Unidux, articulates her coaching sense in different industries.
Bonnie coaches executives to inspire their courage, perspective, direction and insight to lead, finance, manage, optimize and preserve their own business or corporate assets with their all-round and integrated inside-out solutions. She also assists HR managers and directors in adopting coaching culture and environment for their talented staff development program and has delivered workshops on leadership and communication skills in China.
Bonnie is the first IAC-CC certified coach from Hong Kong, and served as the Director on the Board of Governors of International Association of Coaching (IAC). One of the first-batch coaches in Asia, Bonnie is the founding member of the Hong Kong International Coaching Community (HKICC), was elected as President in 2005/6 and is actively involved as the Honorary Advisor to the community. She is currently a part time lecturer in the HKU Space teaching Corporate Coaching. Bonnie is accredited to administer the Harrison Assessment Tool.
She has a BA degree from the Keio University of Japan in Human Science, an MSc Degree from West Coast University in Applied Eco-Psychology and completed her coaching training at The Graduate School of Coaching, Coachville. Bonnie is also a Founding Fellow of the Institute of Coaching Professional Association (ICPA), a Harvard Medical School affiliate. She has lived and worked in Hong Kong, Japan, Canada and China and speaks English, Putonghua, Cantonese and Japanese.
Hélène Seiler
Hélène has, during a career spanning over 20 years, gained extensive experience as an Executive Coach, Outplacement Coach, Trainer and Facilitator with clients located all over the world. She coaches individuals and teams through all kinds of challenges including leading change, leveraging team diversity, giving and receiving feedback, communication, networking and conflict management. She is certified in a number of 360 and psychometric tools including MBTI, Firo B, CPI 260, Workplace Big Five, Benchmarks, Executive Dimensions and the Conflict Dynamic Profile.
Previously in partnership with Stewart Cooper Coon, she developed a proprietary recruiting process to select and on-board executives. Working with the Five O’ Clock Club, she has run job search action-learning workshops and individual career coaching sessions for retrenched senior management. She wrote a book on job search techniques, For Executives Only, published in 2007. Hélène previously held roles across Europe and the USA with AT Kearney, CRCI and Credit Lyonnais.
She is a Master Certified Coach with the International Coaches Federation (ICF), holds a Masters in Management Science from the HEC School of Management and a graduate diploma in ontological coaching with Newfield Institute. In addition she is an Executive Committee Member of the Asia Pacific Alliance of Coaches and is an Associate Coach with the Center for Creative Leadership.
Sarah Harley
Sarah is a Partner at Silk Road and provides operational and client support in London, in addition to providing her professional expertise on branding, communications and marketing.
Her career started at Grand Metropolitan and J Sainsbury plc, before a move into advertising, joining Leo Burnett and later Bartle Bogle Hegarty. Clients included NatWest, Procter & Gamble, United Distillers, McDonalds and Kraft. Moving back across the client fence, she joined BT’s CCU (Customer Communications Unit) team, which was responsible for some of the UK’s most memorable award winning campaigns such as “Its good to talk” with Bob Hoskins. Sarah later ran the BT Forum, which involved itself externally in supporting BT’s belief in the importance of good communication, at work, home and in other ways, and provided support to charities for children like “The Place to Be”. This insight into communication led her to become Programme Manager of BT’s Millennium Programme.
Before being tempted back from being a full time Mum and co-founding Silk Road in the UK, Sarah worked for the National Youth Orchestra, helping them shape their Marketing and PR, whilst continuing her own musical qualifications.
Sarah was educated at Royal Holloway College, University of London and gained a BA(Hons) in Modern History, Economic History & Politics.