ISA Insights: "My career is a playlist of callings, each about breadth, connection and meaning."

Kennenlern-Interview mit ISA Board Member Roger "Hodge" Vacher

ISA Board Member Roger Vacher

Here’s Roger aka Hodge, a true business all-rounder! With a career spanning everything from strategy and consulting to logistics and copywriting, he’s made his mark in industries like financial services, Big Pharma, hospitality, and renewable energy.

Roger is the perfect fit for startups, SMEs, and dynamic companies looking for a pro who can bridge silos, spark innovation, and drive sustainable growth. With an Executive MBA in strategy and a natural ENFP flair, he brings creativity, empathy, and teamwork to every project. Having lived and worked in over 20 countries, he’s developed a keen sense for cultural nuances, knowing that in today’s VUCA world, it’s all about finding the right balance - after all, as he says, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast, lunch and dinner!”

Curious to learn more? Dive into our interview with Roger, where he shares his insights and visions for the future.

Hodge, when did you realise you weren’t a classical specialist?

I was twenty-one, fresh out of university, speeding to Coopers & Lybrand’s audit induction. On the train I made a beeline for one of the few seats facing forwards; my colleagues settled contentedly facing backwards. That scramble said it all: give me the unfolding view, not yesterday’s ledgers. Four weeks later I resigned, swapped balance-sheet counts for open roads, and returned to my beloved summer job, leading and guiding trans-European coach tours.

To friends and family, guiding looked niche and even “beneath me”. Yet the scope was vast. One moment I was raconteur and product designer; the next a salesman, a supply-chain fixer, a diplomat, and a crisis-manager on a motorway hard shoulder tending to a guest’s heart attack. Guiding introduced me to the full scope of the human condition and how to translate intercultural contexts into clear operational choices and narrative frames, never to assume anything when the stakes are high.

A master’s in hospitality followed, then M&A work at Deloitte in hospitality and tourism. And when that felt too narrow, I turned once more to the forward-facing seat: fourteen more years leading tours across Europe and Costa Rica, including a stint running my own venture. Post-MBA I pivoted to a renewable-energy start-up in the Balkans, spent six years untangling Big Pharma supply chains, freelanced as a copywriter intermittently, and now lecture MBAs and tourism-masters students.

Looking back, “career” never fitted. Actually, I doubt it fits Gen Y, Z or A, or the world either. Mine is a playlist of callings, each about breadth, connection and meaning, each demanding I learn, unlearn and integrate across functions and industries while still in motion. It’s been an unexpected but exhilarating tour of management, business and, above all, the human condition!

What connects your roles?

With every role I start by asking four things: What is the purpose of this business; who is genuinely served; how does the wider system, including its sustainability, operate; and where are the ethical boundaries? Those questions strip noise from signal, clarify intent and reveal the seams between functions. Once answered, I focus on the people, processes and ideas that keep the answers alive.

When our renewable energy start up in the Balkans lost momentum I stood the team at a whiteboard, mapped goals, constraints and capabilities, and cut the story back to its core proof point; the simplified pitch generated the focus we needed, probably helping us secure our first power purchase agreement even if our battle cry for funding ultimately never came.

Storytelling threads through each job. Guiding people across Europe taught me that relevance and intelligence beats spectacle any day; my great uncle’s reminder still rings true, “The customer is not a moron, she is your wife”. Expectations management is ninety nine per cent of any project. Big Pharma pressured me to swap long copy for brevity, a skill I am still working at .. and still shy away from, for better or for worse.

Tour work quickly revealed that a driver’s mandatory coffee break not only saves lives but can also derail a rail connection four hours later; seeing the system end to end (with empathy), and planning accordingly, let's you sleep better. Pharma reinforced that clean data, matched cycle times and the right sized ERP matter more than expensive add ons.

But more importantly, what connects is the realisation that people are at the heart of everything. Dee Hock, founder of Visa, observed that an organisation is nothing more than an ecosystem of people and their relationships. I agree. Whatever we do in life, isn't our task to help people weave their threads, gently tying the why, the how and the what into a story everyone can walk into? We need a lot more of that, everywhere.

How important is intercultural competence in today’s VUCA world?

My childhood played out in 5 star hotel corridors from Bahrain to Mexico City; cultural code-switching became muscle memory long before I learnt the term. Since then I have watched immaculate strategies stall because an unspoken norm went unnoticed, or a single phrase carried the wrong emotional freight. Too many professionals still treat culture as surface décor, yet it shapes policy debates, procurement choices and the daily rhythm of management meetings.

I have seen talented colleagues falter, not through lack of skill, but because they could not read the room, or missed what six nationalities were saying between the lines. The same pattern recurs: people focus on slide decks while the invisible mix of histories, power dynamics and local etiquette keeps the real scoreboard. Anglo-American firms are often the worst offenders, assuming one playbook fits all.

The lesson is blunt. Culture doesn’t just eat strategy for breakfast, but also for lunch and dinner. If you want to thrive you must learn the codes, metaphors and silences of your context. Corporate rulebooks filled with procedural scripts or global engagement guides rarely solve the issue; fluency comes only through curiosity, listening and a willingness to adapt in real time.

Which abilities make a generalist effective?

Three abilities sit at the core of a good generalist: restless curiosity, pattern recognition, and the nerve to ask whether the brief itself is the problem. Curiosity casts the widest net and refuses to be fenced in by job titles; pattern recognition joins dots others miss; nerve buys the extra ten minutes a meeting needs for the right questions to surface.

Because of that mind-set I keep one eye on the horizon, scanning the periphery and weighing second-order effects. In my Big Pharma supply-chain days, the generalist in me rarely followed through on a “Ship it now or else” command. A cross-functional mapping of tax, audit, quality, legal and reputational knock-ons gave me the confidence to push back; speed would cost far more than patience. 

On a separate tack, every role comes with an onboarding runway of jargon, culture, processes and silent rules (I call this transferable learning velocity). Employers often forget that runway, yet it can level the generalist with the specialist. The generalist nearly always has the time in a new role to learn, model systems and test assumptions at speed while bringing the fresh vantage of an outsider. I have moved from consulting to guiding, from start-ups to Big Pharma, and into lecturing without fuss because of my transferable skills and that onboarding runway that gives me time to adapt. 

In short, specialists tune the coach engine or formulate the active ingredient; generalists plan the route, brief the guests, and scan the horizon for storms. When a firm is run only by accountants the view too often narrows to yesterday’s ledgers unless they have also done other things. Balance matters: teams short of breadth drift into silos that look efficient until they collide. And as artificial intelligence automates ever-narrower tasks, the capacity to roam across functions, read nuance and weave coherence may rise in value.

What challenges do generalists face in the Swiss job market, and what must change?

Let us be candid: generalists rarely fit the hiring grid in Switzerland. The country, whether competing in the local or international economy, prizes precision, certification and tidy hierarchies; those strengths become blind spots when candidates do not fit a neat template.

Worse, job adverts read like spare-parts catalogues these days, each bullet a micro-credential that no single person could, or would wish to, cover in full. Applicant tracking systems then hunt for “perfect matches”, discarding anything that strays from the specification, so the people who can knit functions together disappear before a human even sees the CV. When I present three degrees and five industry lanes I hear the silent hum of hesitation and then silence, proof that breadth still confounds the grid.

Middle layers reinforce the pattern. HR teams, now styled as “business partners”, chase compliance targets, head-count limits and risk metrics streaming from ERP dashboards; breadth looks risky simply because it is hard to score. Meanwhile, multinationals operating in Switzerland tap a wider and cheaper labour pool across the EU and beyond, dulling the incentive to cultivate home-grown specialists who grow into generalists with specialisms.  The message remains stark: pick a silo early, or prepare for exile.

Who, then, is responsible? Boards that claim they want agility must back the specialist-turned-generalist labour market; without it, collaboration, systems thinking and problem framing will stall. Recruitment software should, by design or legal requirement, score for adjacency and learning velocity, not just box-ticking overlap. Finally, immigration debates need a finer brush; early signs suggest Bern may seek new quota brakes in sectors facing steep redundancies, and that conversation will demand far more nuance than the current polarised slogans.

You have worked in corporates, start-ups, SMEs and as a freelancer. What drives that career range?

Different seasons ask for different habitats. Corporates gave structure and salary when I needed traction; start-ups offered speed and sleepless nights; SMEs added intimacy and moments of surprise; freelancing supplied frameworks and freedom; teaching returned purpose and a mirror on what I had learnt. I measure success less by ladder rungs and more by staying responsive to circumstance, learning continuously and remaining present to life in full.

How do you see the future of work, and what are you watching closely?

I trade in hunches, not prophecies. Artificial intelligence will trim white-collar head-counts and may force us towards some form of basic income. Ownership of assets and narrative sense-making will matter more than job titles. Four-day weeks will spread and the gig economy will grow exponentially. My plan: stay curious, keep my tools sharp and connect, connect, connect. It’s not going to be easy.

Why did you join ISA, and what do you hope to add as a board member?

ISA pairs conversation with action. Switzerland excels in many things, yet its education-to-employment pipe is fragmented and, dare I say, dated. Bringing government, business, academia and labour to one table is timely and urgent. I want us at ISA to strengthen that cross-sector dialogue, weave social and artificial intelligence into mainstream up-skilling and look at other simple wins, like project management as a basic competency for every white-collar worker. Critical to every role, it is no longer a luxury elective.  More than anything else, I want a Switzerland that is more internally resilient in the job market and that focuses hard on not leaving anyone behind, because this is possibly the biggest challenge facing every last society in the West today.

Give an example where innovation links with meaningful work.

I am refining a concept called conscious travel which I have started to publish on Substack. The aim is to recast hospitality, tourism, leisure (travel) so that the journeys we make in our lives are restorative rather than extractive and exploitative - and they really are. The focus is on why travel, equity, local stewardship and regenerative practice both at home and abroad, as challenge to “innovation”. And this is just part of a movement arising everywhere. For example, André Hoffmann reminds us in his latest tome that business must nourish the biosphere that sustains it if we are to survive. Innovation here is humble design for the commons, a recognition that we have one planet and had better look after everything in it much better than we currently do.

What is your vision for ISA, and what would success look like in five years?

I want ISA seated at every table where Switzerland decides how to build an agile workforce and a systems-literate education fit for the twenty-first century, especially in sustainability, digital transformation and purposeful work. In five years true success will mean that employers, educators and policymakers, from federal offices to cantonal chambers, cite ISA as the reference point for future skills and delivery models. Graduates will leave formal schooling able to navigate complexity and will find fit-for-purpose upskilling programmes at each stage of their working lives. Companies, meanwhile, might be nudged to cast their nets wider when hiring and will be reminded daily that economic strength, social purpose and ecological care must share the same sentence if they wish to remain resilient and keep customers who can afford their goods and services.

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Der Innovationsverband Schweizer Arbeitsmarkt (ISA) gestaltet die Zukunft der Arbeit. Seit 2024 entwickelt das engagierte Team innovative Lösungen für Professionals, Unternehmen und Verwaltungen, abgestimmt auf die Anforderungen einer dynamischen Arbeitswelt. Mit Fokus auf politisches Engagement, Bildung und Netzwerke stärkt ISA den Schweizer Arbeitsmarkt – agil, inklusiv und zukunftsorientiert.