In this episode of The Purposeful Strategist, Belden Menkus speaks with Stuart Wallace, Chief Executive of Forth Ports Limited, about what it takes to lead critical national infrastructure at a moment of profound transition — and what a long career inside one organisation teaches you about strategy, culture, and purpose.

Stuart joined Forth Ports in 2002 as financial controller for its Scottish operations, making a habit of getting to know people in other roles and ‘what makes the business tick.’ He became COO in 2016 and Chief Executive in 2024, having held nine different roles across the group. Today, Forth Ports handles around 30 million tonnes of cargo a year across eight sites, employs over 1,300 people, and holds statutory harbour authority responsibility for the Forth and Tay estuaries.

In their conversation, they discuss:

• What ports do, and what’s at stake if they don’t work, particularly for an island nation like the UK.

• The purpose of Forth Ports to act as an economic driver for trade and their other areas of operation, and how this purpose is supported by their strong values of collaboration and dependability.

• How Forth Ports approached the energy transition: recognising that the market was pivoting to renewables and investing in offshore wind infrastructure at Dundee without a single contract in place. They are now delivering foundations for a 1.2 gigawatt wind farm out of Leith.

• The discipline of long-horizon strategy: why a port operator can take infrastructure risk that other businesses can’t, and how Stuart thinks about investment decisions for assets that will still matter many decades from now.

• What it means to lead a business that is simultaneously commercial, statutory, and community-rooted, and how Stuart has made the organisation’s values felt on the ground, not just posted on a wall.

Forth Ports: https://www.forthports.co.uk/

Menkus & Associates: https://www.menkus.com/

Supported by Norman Broadbent: https://www.normanbroadbent.com/

Belden Menkus is the Managing Director of Menkus & Associates, a senior strategic advisory practice that provides strategic clarity for businesses with a public remit, where scrutiny is high, governance is complex, and the answers aren’t obvious. His McKinsey training combined with more than 30 years working at Board and ExCo level gives him both the analytical rigour and the relational experience that complex, high-stakes leadership situations demand.

Belden hosts The Purposeful Strategist, a weekly podcast. It explores how senior leaders bring purpose to life through strategy and reflects the same questions that drive the consulting work.

In this episode of The Purposeful Strategist, Belden Menkus speaks with Ben Fletcher, Chief Executive of Logistics UK, about what it means to be the voice for an industry that employs 2.7 million people, makes up around 8–9% of the UK economy, and underpins almost every aspect of daily life.

Ben came to Logistics UK from Make UK, the trade association for manufacturing, where a decade of experience at the intersection of government, policy, and industry left him convinced that logistics was the missing link in the UK’s economic growth story. In their conversation, they discuss:

• Why logistics is the precondition for economic growth, not simply a contributor, and why Ben believes government has yet to fully grasp that dependency.

• The organisation Ben inherited: 22,000 member organisations spanning SMEs and global firms, 350 staff, 130 years of history, with a well-regarded vehicle inspection and compliance business operating in a competitive market.

• A strategy for becoming the single voice for an industry covering road, rail, air, and sea transport — and on making an economy-wide argument, not just a sector-specific one, to put logistics at the centre of national policy debate.

• The role of data and anecdote in political influence: how data gets you in the room, and how the right story from a member gets things done.

• COVID as a test of the sector’s public purpose — and what it revealed about an industry whose people kept going when most others stayed home.

• How AI and technology can be transformative for efficiency in logistics, without replacing the human judgment that still sits at the controls of vehicles, trains, planes, and ships.

• Both challenges and optimism for the workforce: an ageing industry, a compelling social mobility story, and a lobbying agenda that’s pushing back on the assumption that a university degree is the only route to a successful career.

Logistics UK: https://www.logistics.org.uk/

Menkus & Associates: https://www.menkus.com/

Supported by Norman Broadbent: https://www.normanbroadbent.com/

Belden Menkus is the Managing Director of Menkus & Associates, a senior strategic advisory practice that provides strategic clarity for businesses with a public remit, where scrutiny is high, governance is complex, and the answers aren’t obvious. His McKinsey training combined with more than 30 years working at Board and ExCo level gives him both the analytical rigour and the relational experience that complex, high-stakes leadership situations demand.

Belden hosts The Purposeful Strategist, a weekly podcast. It explores how senior leaders bring purpose to life through strategy and reflects the same questions that drive the consulting work.

In this episode of The Purposeful Strategist, Belden Menkus speaks with Colin Walsh, founder and Board Chair of Civitas ID, about the foundational struggle for the world's millions of displaced people: the ability to prove their identity across borders, and the infrastructure needed to enable it.

Colin's career in financial services, including as CEO of Varo Bank, taught him that some of the most difficult problems of exclusion are upstream of banking access, and lie in proving identity. He is tackling this problem with Civitas through building open-source digital public infrastructure for the roughly 123 million people currently living in a state of forced displacement. In their conversation, they discuss:

Why identity is a foundational barrier for displaced people trying to access work, banking, healthcare, and education, and how documentation failures trap people in limbo.

The structure of Civitas (a US nonprofit) and Etymos (a public benefit corporation): how the two organizations work together to serve both the public good and the private sector participants, banks, lenders, employers, whose engagement is essential to facilitating inclusion.

Why technology is not the only factor: how Colin and his team stress-test ideas directly with displaced communities, why policy reform and advocacy matter as much as technology, and what genuine listening, as opposed to validation-seeking, looks like in practice.

Kenya and Colombia as pilot markets, and what the contrast between the two markets reveals about pace, partnership, and the conditions that enable systemic change.

Civitas ID: https://www.civitasid.org/

Etymos: https://www.etymosid.com/

Menkus & Associates: https://www.menkus.com/

Supported by Norman Broadbent: https://www.normanbroadbent.com/

Belden Menkus is the Managing Director of Menkus & Associates, a senior strategic advisory practice that provides strategic clarity for businesses with a public remit, where scrutiny is high, governance is complex, and the answers aren't obvious. His McKinsey training combined with more than 30 years working at Board and ExCo level gives him both the analytical rigour and the relational experience that complex, high-stakes leadership situations demand.

Belden hosts The Purposeful Strategist, a weekly podcast. It explores how senior leaders bring purpose to life through strategy and reflects the same questions that drive the consulting work.