Corporate Affairs, built for what comes next.
What does your business need from the function – now and in the future?
Larkmere helps organisations build and transform the Corporate Affairs function, strengthen the leaders who run it and navigate critical moments – driving greater strategic clarity and impact.
More is being asked of Corporate Affairs. With less.
As businesses scale, restructure and change leadership, what they need from Corporate Affairs changes just as fast.
AI is changing how Corporate Affairs work gets done, how issues surface, and how a company's reputation is built or broken: it is not just a tool, it is a stakeholder. At the same time, functions are being asked to do more with less: headcount held or cut, budgets flat, and more expected regardless.
Most functions try to absorb these changes by doing the same work with fewer people. That is a holding position at best, and it rarely holds effectively for long. Quality slips, the best people leave, and the function weakens at exactly the moment the business needs it to be sharper.
Larkmere helps leaders answer where the value is, what to prioritise, and how the function needs to change – and then turn it into action.
Three connected ways we help
We work on the function itself, the people who run it and the moments that test it.
Build or transform the function
From establishing Corporate Affairs for the first time to redesigning a complex global organisation, we help leaders define the mandate, structure, capabilities and operating model the business needs – starting with what the function should own. Should brand sit here? Marketing? Investor relations? Every company draws those lines differently, and where they fall impacts how the function must operate.
Strengthen leaders and teams
Strong functions depend on strong leadership. We work with Corporate Affairs leaders and their teams – and with senior functional leaders more broadly – to strengthen judgement, influence and performance, from leadership counsel and team effectiveness to capability development and critical hires.
Navigate critical moments
Independent senior counsel where reputation, leadership and business strategy intersect. We help leaders see issues clearly, challenge assumptions and make sound decisions through transactions, crises, organisational change and other moments of heightened scrutiny.
CLARITY is Larkmere's diagnostic framework for assessing what the function needs to become – and where change should start.
Scope the whole function. Decide what needs to change.
CLARITY™ is Larkmere's diagnostic and transformation framework for Corporate Affairs. It provides an independent view of where the function is today, what the business will need from it next and how it needs to change to address the gap.
Seven lenses on the function
- CCapabilityDo you have the people, skills and structure to deliver what the business needs?
- LLeadershipIs the function led with a clear mandate, strategy and priorities?
- AAlignmentIs the function focused on what the business needs, with the authority to deliver?
- RReturnIs the investment in the right places, and can you prove value?
- IIntelligenceDo you know what is really happening, early enough to take the right actions?
- TTeamDo you have the right people, set up to do their best work?
- YYouIs the leader positioned effectively to have the impact the role demands?
Every engagement asks all seven questions, then goes deep on the ones that matter most to your organisation. Scope runs on a continuum – from a short senior diagnostic to a full evidence-based assessment, or a programme designed around a specific brief.
When CLARITY is especially useful
Creating the function for the first time
Preparing for growth, IPO or increased scrutiny
Realigning an established function to business strategy
Addressing gaps exposed by change, crisis or reputational pressure
Different leaders. The same underlying questions.
Where can Corporate Affairs make the biggest contributions to this business – and is the function equipped to do it?
“What should Corporate Affairs look like for this business – and is it delivering what we need?”
An independent perspective on mandate, leadership, structure, capability, investment and impact – particularly as businesses scale, face greater scrutiny or prepare for the public markets.
“How do I turn the function I have into the function the business requires?”
Experienced, discreet, independent counsel for leaders building, resetting or transforming Corporate Affairs – or seeking to increase its strategic contribution and influence.
“Claire didn’t just diagnose the problem and walk away. She stayed and helped us fix it. We built a much more robust approach to issues management and a clear plan for what came next. And when something difficult landed, I knew I could pick up the phone and get a straight answer, fast, from someone who’d seen it before.”Founder & CEOFintech unicorn
“Claire came prepared, knew what to ask and where to push. The CLARITY framework gave us structure, surfaced what had been holding us back and helped us make decisions we’d been circling for months. We left with a clear roadmap for reshaping the function around what the business needed.”Group Head, Corporate Affairs & BrandEnergy sector
“Claire supported a key client of ours at a critical stage and rolled up her sleeves from day one. She quickly identified the priorities and helped drive strategy, structure and stronger ways of working. She was constructive throughout, focused on the best outcome, and challenged us to raise our collective game. She did a great job setting the team up for the next stage.”PartnerLeading corporate communications agency
Experience from the inside
Larkmere's counsel is grounded not simply in consulting to Corporate Affairs leaders, but in having built, led and transformed functions.
Larkmere is founded and led by Claire Dixon, a global Corporate Affairs leader with more than 25 years' experience building functions and advising senior leaders through transformation, growth and high-stakes change.
Most recently, Claire was Group Head of Corporate Affairs, Brand and Marketing at Standard Chartered, leading a 500-person global function through a complex three-year transformation across more than 60 markets. Before Standard Chartered, she spent eight years in Silicon Valley, serving as Chief Communications Officer at Intel and VMware and as VP of Global Communications at eBay. In each of these businesses she inherited a Corporate Affairs function under pressure and rebuilt it – structure, capability, mandate and measurement.
Across those roles, Claire has advised CEOs, executive teams and Boards through major transactions, spin-outs, activist investor challenges, cyber crises, rapid growth and significant organisational change.
Earlier, at GSK, she was VP of Global Corporate Responsibility. She has operated across the UK, US, Asia, Africa and the Middle East.
Claire is a Non-Executive Director of MHA, a leader in elder care and retirement living, and a faculty leader for World50's global Next Leaders programme. She graduated with an MA in Geography from Cambridge University.
What does your business need from Corporate Affairs – now and in the future?
Start with a confidential conversation. Whether you are building the capability from scratch, preparing for growth or an IPO, resetting an established function or responding to a reputational challenge, the question is the same.
Based in London, working across the UK, Europe and the USA.