Why I built CoachCorrie

A title anyone can print

If you’re an Executive Coach that wants to define and defend your niche, with science-backed reporting and quantifiable impact value, then you’re on the right page.

My last search on LinkedIn for people using the title “Executive Coach,” returned more than 386,000 results. What I couldn’t find is any agreement on what those two words mean. The title is unregulated. No exam, no license, no supervising body. Nothing stops anyone from printing it on a business card this afternoon. I’ve spent thirty years coaching and advising executives, and that fact still frustrates me more than almost anything else in my field.

Here’s why it matters. Coaching is a big discipline, and executive coaching is a niche inside it… a niche that runs from holding space (strategic, non-judgmental silence) all the way to corrective intervention, and demands fluency in behavioral science, business strategy, life-and-career design, and leadership development coaching all at once. It took me decades to collect the tools I carry now. Executives at the top of their game need more than someone who asks, “What would you like to work on today?” They need coaches who know their game and can raise their level of play.

Michael Phelps broke thirty-nine world records with Bob Bowman on the pool deck. Bowman swam competitively for a couple of years in the mid-1980s, but his swimming was never what Phelps needed from him. His coaching was. In the modern age there is no such thing as an Olympic athlete without an Olympic coach, and I’ve argued on the TEDx stage that the same is absolutely true of executives. It’s also why, on this platform, we don’t say “coachee” or “client.” We say Executive Athlete.

Performance, not repair

In Chief Executive Coach I offered my working definition of the discipline:

Executive coaching is a co-creative process in which a coach and an executive elicit insights and actions from each other to optimize the mindset and skillset required for the executive to perform at their personal best in their executive role.

Does that sound like remedial work to you?

Me neither. Executive performance is our primary focus. We don’t fix broken leaders, that’s a therapist’s job. Our job is to raise the sustained, average-day performance of world class executives. That’s what coaching does for athletes, and it’s what it should do for the people running companies.

The proof problem

The unregulated title creates two problems, and I’ve lived both sides of them. Executives can’t find good coaches in all that noise. Chemistry set-ups are like swiping right on a BCG menu. Many try one, or two, get an hour of pleasant questions, and quietly give up on the whole discipline. And good coaches can’t easily prove they’re good: sessions are confidential, progress is behavioral, and the results diffuse into outcomes the executive rightly owns. Value … measuring it, attributing it honestly, reporting it in a form a CFO would accept … that’s our primary challenge as a profession.

I’ve made the case in Forbes that coaching is a performance differentiator for executives just as it is for athletes, and that boards that don’t mandate coaching for their executives are failing a fiduciary duty. I stand behind both arguments. But argument isn’t evidence, and our industry’s evidence discipline is weak. In my own practice I’ve documented returns of 60x to 600x ROI on my fees (in one engagement, over 900x), and I can say that only because we measure relentlessly and attribute conservatively. Most coaches were never given the machinery to do either.

Why I built CoachCorrie

So I built the machinery to do what I needed as an Executive Coach, and I’ve been using it for more than two years now, at the CXO and GCXO level in companies like ADNOC, Etisalat in the GCC, and Hilton and Mastercard globally. CoachCorrie is a working platform for serious executive coaches: every engagement gets its own sealed knowledgebase, and a team of twenty specialized AI agents turns the record of your coaching into the evidence of your coaching: session synthesis, progress reporting, the Executive Performance Index, and an ROI analysis a sponsor can interrogate.

Those agents were trained by me; not in the machine-learning sense (no model here is ever trained or fine-tuned on your data, or on anyone’s), but the way I’d train a human associate: two years of direct instruction, correction, and testing, built on thirty years of executive coaching and strategic advisory work and the methodology behind my books and best practices. And the coach stays the coach … nothing an agent drafts reaches an Executive Athlete or a sponsor until you’ve reviewed it and signed it off.

CoachCorrie is NOT an AI coach.

I wouldn’t take that risk with any executive’s performance. CoachCorrie is your science-backed Assistant Coach. It’s like having me on your coaching team. Me and 19 other versions of that numbers guy from the movie Moneyball, which was a true story, BTW. Your story is just as true, and you can’t be replaced. It doesn’t replace you, it augments you in ways that makes your Executive Athletes more focused in their development, and you more competitive in your market. You are a performance differentiator for your clients, and CoachCorrie is a performance differentiator for you.

Executives deserve better coaches. Coaches deserve better evidence.

If you’re a coach who takes the craft that seriously, apply for an account. If you have questions first, write to me.