Introducing the Mobility Executive Search Practice

Mobility is no longer a sector. It is a convergence — of automotive, aerospace, consumer electronics, and software — and it has been reshaping our search work quietly for several years. This week we are naming that work formally: the Mobility Executive Search Practice now exists as its own group inside Alder Koten and IMD International Search Group, with a dedicated pillar and fourteen category subpages covering the surfaces where operating leadership is actually being hired.

The reason is straightforward. A search for a head of manufacturing at an eVTOL company reads more like an aerospace search than an automotive one, but the customer-experience layer around that vehicle reads like consumer electronics. A software-defined vehicle team looks like a Silicon Valley platform organization sitting inside a Tier-1 supply chain. A drone operator running Part 135 cargo routes needs the flight-ops discipline of a small airline and the unit economics of a delivery startup. These are not adjacent industries with occasional overlap. They are a single operating landscape whose leaders move fluidly across categories.

The convergence we are naming

Four disciplines that used to sit in separate practice groups now meet on the same leadership brief.

Automotive contributes the manufacturing depth, the supplier ecosystem, and the certification discipline that hard-goods mobility still requires. Every credible mobility hardware company — whether it makes a scooter, a robotaxi, or an eVTOL — eventually needs a plant director who grew up in this world. Automotive also contributes the executive template for scaling from prototype to volume, which is the operating challenge nearly every venture-backed mobility company will face if it survives its Series C.

Aerospace contributes certification rigor, safety-case discipline, and the leadership vocabulary for programs where a failure mode is measured in lives rather than warranty claims. The aerospace and defense practice increasingly overlaps with drones and UAS, urban air mobility and eVTOL, and space mobility. The DO-178C and AS9100 mindset is now a mobility mindset. That transfer has been the single most visible shift in aerospace searches over the past three years.

Consumer electronics contributes the product-experience layer — hardware plus software plus service — and the tempo of consumer-grade release cycles. A shared scooter, a robotaxi app, a drone control station, a vehicle infotainment stack: all four are consumer-electronics problems in industrial-scale packaging. Companies that hire only automotive or only aerospace leaders for these surfaces consistently underestimate the design and iteration cadence required.

Software contributes the platform architecture and, increasingly, the CEO. Software-defined vehicles, autonomous stacks, fleet-management platforms, MaaS applications, and the entire cloud layer under any modern mobility product are software organizations wearing hardware clothes. The best mobility leaders we have placed in the last two years came from software backgrounds and had to acquire physical-world literacy, not the other way around.

Two operating models, one practice

The other reason for a formal practice is that the ecosystem now moves along two parallel tracks that require different search discipline.

OEMs and Tier-1 suppliers run mobility programs alongside their legacy platforms. A traditional automaker launching a robotaxi program or a battery-EV platform is a large-organization problem: the leader needs corporate credibility, program-management rigor, and the ability to survive matrix organizations. The search calibration looks like a classic automotive or aerospace search, with mobility-specific overlays around software and certification.

Venture-backed mobility startups operate on a different clock and a different capital structure. Series B through IPO, they are hiring first-time COOs, VP-engineering-at-scale, and founder-to-CEO successors. The evaluation reads more like a growth-stage technology search — burn rate, board dynamics, dilution — than like a manufacturing or aerospace search. We now have a dedicated VC-backed mobility startups page precisely because this track cannot be run as an afterthought inside a traditional industrial search.

The Mobility Practice is designed so that the same senior consultant can hold both operating models in view. That matters when a client is an OEM standing up a venture spinout, or a startup recruiting a president from a Fortune 100 supplier. Those two calibrations sit inside one conversation, not two.

What the practice covers

The pillar now anchors fourteen category subpages: micromobility and shared scooters, ride-hail and shared mobility, autonomous vehicles and robotaxi, drones and UAS, urban air mobility and eVTOL, software-defined vehicle, EV charging infrastructure, Mobility-as-a-Service, autonomous delivery and ground robotics, marine autonomy, rail and next-generation transit, space mobility, the horizontal mobility supply chain, and the venture-backed startup ecosystem.

The pages are Mexico-anchored where the market exists in Mexico — micromobility, ride-hail, charging infrastructure, and the tier-two supply chain that feeds every mobility category — and global where the market is global. This mirrors how the assignments themselves land: some searches are unambiguously Mexico corridor, some are unambiguously global, and a growing number cross the border in both directions. The US–Mexico cross-border practice sits directly alongside Mobility for that reason.

How to engage

If you are a founder, CEO, or board director hiring senior operating leadership anywhere across this landscape — from a scooter operator to a satellite bus program — the practice is built to hold that conversation without asking you to translate what you do into a legacy category that no longer describes it.

Start a conversation with the Mobility Practice.

Every mandate is delivered under the Dynamic Fit Method — the same calibration discipline that underwrites the rest of our search work — and is run by senior consultants who stay with the assignment from scoping through onboarding. The practice draws on the IMD International Search Group network for cross-border reach where mandates cross regions.

Jose J. Ruiz is CEO and Managing Partner of Alder Koten, President of IMD International Search Group, and Chairman of Anker Bioss.