From Shell to Advisory: Akin Monehin Puts His Execution Thesis to the Test

After more than two decades inside complex organisations, the former Shell executive is building a new practice around a deceptively difficult question: what is actually causing the result leadership wants to change?

Akin Monehin has built a new advisory firm around execution. Yet one of the first things he says about the subject is that too many business problems are wrongly described as execution problems.

“If everything is an execution problem, execution explains nothing,” he says. “Sometimes the strategy is wrong. Sometimes capability is missing. Sometimes somebody is simply not performing. Sometimes the technical answer is inadequate. You have to be able to tell the difference.”

It is an unusual opening position for someone whose new firm is called Praxis Execution Advisory.

Monehin left Shell in June after more than 25 years across energy, aviation and entrepreneurship, with work spanning more than 10 countries. A former Shell executive and best-selling author of Execution Is a Lie, he is now trying to convert an operating career spent inside complex organisations into an independent advisory practice.

The transition has created a different test.

Inside an organisation, an executive can use authority. An adviser cannot.

“As an operator, I could challenge a plan, move attention, escalate an issue and sometimes change the system from inside it,” Monehin says. “As an adviser, you first have to understand the system well enough for the people who own it to decide what should change. That is a very different discipline.”

The problems being brought to him are varied. Monehin says early conversations have ranged from procurement and cost to ownership, decision speed, cross-functional delivery, leadership depth and the ability to keep critical priorities moving as organisations become more complex.

But he is wary of diagnosing from the label a client gives the problem.

A procurement delay may genuinely be a procurement problem. Or procurement may be waiting for specifications, finance may be protecting cash, operations may be changing priorities, and no one may own the trade-off across all four.

The visible symptom is not always the cause.

That distinction has wider relevance. In an August interview, Adeolu Adewumi-Zer, founder of ZER Consulting Africa and former Managing Director of Allianz Nigeria, argued that many Nigerian businesses reach a point where structures that enabled early growth become constraints: founder-dependent decision-making can weaken accountability and succession as the organisation scales.

In the energy sector, Renaissance Africa Energy executive Olusegun Banwo made a related point at NOG Energy Week in July. He argued that future growth would depend not only on resources and capital but on institutional capability, talent and resilient supply chains. “Every energy ambition ultimately translates into a capability requirement,” he said.

Neither argument is about consultancy. Both point to the same management reality: growth changes what an organisation must be capable of doing.

Monehin’s interest is in what happens when leadership responds to the wrong manifestation of that problem.

“If the issue appears in procurement, the instinct is to fix procurement,” he says. “But if the delay is being created by an unresolved engineering-operational decision three steps earlier, you can make procurement faster and still not change the outcome.”

The strongest evidence behind the argument comes from Monehin’s years in enterprise transformation inside Shell.

From 2019 to 2025, as Business Transformation Manager in Shell’s deepwater business and a member of its executive leadership team, he worked across Production Operations, Well Engineering, Projects, Commercial, Finance and other functions on an enterprise-wide transformation agenda. The integrated effort contributed approximately US$1.7 billion in incremental free cash flow over five years.

Monehin is careful about the attribution.

“That was never ‘Akin delivered US$1.7 billion’,” he says. “Production Operations produced. Well Engineering delivered wells and interventions. Projects delivered projects. Commercial negotiated extra cargo payments. WRFM optimized the reservoirs. Finance helped with baselines and assuring the efficiencies. Other functions enabled the work. My role was to help connect the priorities, surface constraints, establish the execution rhythm and keep the enterprise focused on the outcomes. The value came from the system working together.”

For him, that distinction is central to the execution thesis: enterprise value is rarely created by one function acting alone, even when individual functions are performing well.

An earlier operating assignment had taught him the same lesson at a more tangible level. At Shell Petroleum Development Company, Monehin led a land-logistics system involving more than 1,000 vehicles and around 2,000 personnel. Fleet availability improved from roughly 60 per cent to about 90 per cent over three years, while production deferments linked to logistics failures were eliminated.

He says the management lesson mattered more than the transport metric.

“At that scale, the problem was never just vehicles,” he recalls. “Planning, contractors, maintenance, visibility, operating priorities and decisions had to work together. You could keep telling transport to perform better and still miss the system producing the result.”

That experience also explains his caution about frameworks.

Consultants are paid partly for pattern recognition. The danger is that pattern recognition can become confirmation bias.

“Experience helps you recognise patterns faster,” Monehin says. “It can also make you wrong faster. A framework should organise evidence. It should never be allowed to overrule it.”

There is a harder commercial question.

What can an execution adviser do that a competent CEO, COO, strategy team or established consulting firm cannot already do?

Monehin does not argue that every company needs an external adviser.

“Sometimes management can and should solve it themselves,” he says. “An adviser earns a role only if independent diagnosis, additional execution capacity or cross-functional integration materially changes an outcome. Otherwise, there is no reason to add another adviser.”

That answer is important because Praxis itself is being proven as an execution institution.

Founded only in June, Praxis credibility, for now, rests much more heavily on the operating record he has acquired over the years than on results generated under the Praxis name.

He does not dispute that.

“The firm is new,” he says. “That should be stated plainly.”

So what will prove the proposition outside Shell and the other organisations in which he built his career?

His answer is shorter.

“Client outcomes. Nothing else.”

It is an intentionally demanding standard.

A diagnostic can be completed. A workshop can be well received. A report can be sophisticated. A framework can be trademarked. None of those things, on its own, means a business has changed.

For Monehin, the relevant proof will be whether the specific outcome that brought management to the table actually improves — whether a recurring constraint stops recurring, value is released, decisions move differently or the organisation becomes less dependent on heroic intervention to deliver routine enterprise outcomes.

The restraint is perhaps the most interesting part of the proposition.

Execution has become an elastic corporate word, used to describe almost everything that happens after a strategy is approved. Monehin is attempting to narrow it: to identify the specific organisational mechanism separating intention from outcome, and then test whether changing that mechanism changes the result.

Whether that becomes a differentiated advisory model is not yet established.

Monehin has spent much of his career arguing that organisations should judge execution by outcomes rather than activity. His new firm will now be subject to the same standard.

The proposition is his.

The evidence will have to come from clients.