There is a moment most people have, early in their working life, when the gap between what they studied and what they find becomes impossible to ignore.
Mine arrived fast.
I had spent years studying two things that don’t usually go together. Computer science at ETH: systems, architecture, logical structure, the discipline of finding where things break. And elite sports coaching, trained by people who worked at the highest level: Simon Ammann’s mental coach, Jean-Pierre Egger, the national handball coach. People who understood, with precision, how structure shapes performance under pressure. How authority needs to sit somewhere clear. How a team either has the architecture to perform or it doesn’t. And no amount of motivation closes that gap.
Then I walked into organisations.
And found that almost nobody had considered any of this.
Not because they weren’t intelligent. Not because they didn’t care about their teams. But because nobody had told them this was a discipline. That it had been studied. That there were people who had spent careers understanding exactly how structure produces behaviour. And how behaviour that looks like a people problem is almost always a structural one.
The gap was wide enough to be almost absurd.
What I kept seeing as a team lead was the same pattern repeating. A person identified as the problem. A team addressed. A restructuring done. And then, quietly, the same issue reassembling itself somewhere else in the organisation. Because the architecture had never been touched.
As CEO and board member, I had the freedom to work differently. To reshape the structure so that issues were addressed at the level where they actually lived, and not managed at the surface and left to return.
The computer science training gave me something useful here: I find logical flaws instinctively. Not as a criticism, as a signal. When something keeps breaking in the same place, that’s not a coincidence. That’s the system telling you something about its own design.
The sports coaching training gave me the other half. I understand what people need to perform inside a structure, and what happens when the structure asks too much of the wrong role, or puts accountability somewhere authority never landed. I’ve watched good people leave bad structures. The leaving was always a signal. The structure had been wrong for longer than anyone had admitted.
That combination is unusual. Most people who work on organisations have one side or the other. The systems thinker who sees the architecture but not the people inside it. Or the people person who understands teams but can’t read the structural layer underneath.
I ended up with both. Which means I can see what’s broken, and understand exactly what it costs the people living inside it.
That’s what The Eagle’s Perspective is built on. I work with CEOs and founders of scaling organisations to redesign the structural architecture that limits their freedom to lead. Not coaching. Not culture work. Not a new org chart. The architecture, where decisions actually live, how authority is distributed, what the system is producing and why.
The question I keep coming back to is the one most organisations never quite ask.
Not who is causing the problem.
What is the system producing, and what would need to change for it to produce something different.
Myrto Zehnder partners with CEOs and founders of scaling organisations on the structural architecture underneath their most persistent problems.
The Eagle’s Perspective — myrtozehnder.com