WORK WITH US
Keynotes. Podcast appearances. Strategic conversations.
Something is off in your organization. The strategy is coherent. The people are capable. The results aren’t matching the model — and nobody can name exactly why.
That gap has a name. It’s an orientation problem. Not a leadership problem, not a communications problem, not an execution problem. Those are downstream. The upstream failure — the one that makes everything else harder than it should be — is that the mental model driving decisions has stopped matching the environment it’s supposed to describe.
That’s what we work on.
Who we are
Mark McGrath | OODA Synthesist spent nearly two decades in asset management developing and applying John Boyd’s work in environments where a wrong read on the environment isn’t a learning opportunity — it’s an existential threat. Brian “Ponch” Rivera is a retired U.S. Navy Captain, former Naval Aviator, and coauthor of The Flow System. Together, we co-host No Way Out, the podcast dedicated to advancing Boyd’s work across every domain where orientation is the decisive terrain.
We don’t teach Boyd as a management framework. We apply his actual work — the full OODA sketch, not the four-step flowchart — to the competitive, cognitive, and institutional environments where orientation failure is already costing you.
Ponch has appeared on TEDx and HedgeyeTV with Keith McCullough. Mark has appeared on The Debrief with Jon Becker. Both of us have spent years in rooms where the ideas have to work, not just sound good.
What we bring to your stage or your feed
The war for reality and meaning is already underway in your industry. Most organizations don’t know they’re in it. Their competitors do.
We show leaders and teams what Boyd actually built — and what it means for the specific environment they’re operating in right now. Asset management. Institutional communications. Professional sports. Special operations. High-growth companies navigating complexity they weren’t built for.
The conversations we have are not abstract. They change how your next meeting runs, how decisions get made, and how your organization reads the environment it’s actually in, not the one it thinks it’s in.
Book us
If you’re putting together a keynote program, a leadership offsite, or a podcast episode and want voices that can make Boyd’s work land for a room that has never heard of him — and for a room that has — reach out.
If you’ve been reading The Whirl and want to explore what a direct advisory conversation looks like, that starts the same way.
→ Contact us at aglx.com/contact-us
Here is Ponch at TEDX:
Here is Mark on The Debrief with Jon Becker:
Here is Ponch on HedgeyeTV with Keith McCullough:
Here is Mark on Capitalist Culture with Kip Knippel:
Here is Mark on OODA Cast with Bob Gourley:
Here is Ponch on Mindplex with Dr. Mihaela Ulieru:
Here is Mark on “Exploring Reality, Maybe” Podcast:
Here is Mark on Mindplex with Dr. Mihaela Ulieru:
