HIGH SEASON tells the stories behind the scale-ups. Not the version from the press release, but how the people who lead growing companies really think, choose and build. Long interviews, in their own words, on seasonalleader.com.
It is also a stage for the field itself. The newest research on leadership and growth, company press releases, and the publications most people never reach, gathered and set out in plain language. What matters right now in leadership and growth is given a place here.
This is what ‘seasonal’ means, because it is the heart of the platform. A company does not always need the same kind of leader. What it needs shifts with the phase. In a growth spurt it wants someone who hires fast and sets the pace. In a crisis it wants someone who decides under pressure and cuts what no longer fits. When it is time for structure, it wants a leader who aligns the team and puts a real operating system under the growth. In quieter, consolidating times, it wants a steady hand. Those four we call Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter, and we place each leader in the season their company is in now.
That changes how you read. Not by title or fame, but by situation. A founder in the middle of a crisis finds the leaders who came through the same summer. A board weighing an appointment sees what each season really asks.
Why give this a name at all? Because most leaders feel a season turn long before they can put words to it. The work that used to flow starts to drag. A once obvious hire suddenly frustrates. Something is off, and the easiest thing to blame is a person. Naming the season instead of judging the person changes the conversation, and it changes it early, while there is still time to act. That matters more now than it used to. Companies move faster, phases turn quicker, and a leader who fits the moment beats one who merely looks impressive on paper. Ineke Kooistra was writing about the seizoens-CEO in the Dutch market well before the idea reached the larger stages, not because she coined it, but because she had lived it. The seasons metaphor is old and honest. Her contribution is to make it practical for the people actually leading through it: clear archetypes, an honest way to tell a genuine mismatch from underperformance, and language a founder or a board can use out loud. HIGH SEASON is where that lens meets real stories.
Beneath everything lies one rule. Selection is never for sale. Leaders pay for the shape of their story and for its distribution. Never for the judgement of it. Every conversation is edited, and nothing goes live before the person in question has approved the words.
We open one genre at a time and go deep. Scale-up Leaders is live now. The AI Officers is next.
This platform comes from someone who has done it. For most of her career Ineke Kooistra has scaled companies, turning small players into international ones. Inside Adecco she built and grew staffing brands across borders. At YoungCapital she led the company organically from 60 to 605 million in revenue, from 198 people to 1,400 internally and 26,000 externally. She knows, first hand, what each season of growth asks of a leader and a team. That is the drive behind HIGH SEASON, and the reason its judgement is worth trusting.
Ineke Kooistra founded HIGH SEASON in 2026. She works as interim CEO, strategic adviser and operating partner alongside founders, boards, investors and C-suites. She founded ELiN Partners and was Group CEO of YoungCapital and Circle8 Group. Everything appears in English, with Dutch translations. inekekooistra.com ↗
Read the Scale-up Leaders →