Robert Peake is a British-American executive coach, organisational consultant and fractional CTO based in Hertfordshire, England. He has been a Senior Consultant and Coach at Next Action Associates since 2012, and before that was CTO of the David Allen Company, the US firm that certified Next Action to deliver GTD® training in the UK. He researches how working with AI affects human judgement, and is a published poet with two full-length collections from Nine Arches Press.

No. Robert Peake the Elder (c. 1551–1619) was an English portrait painter to the court of James I and is a separate historical figure. The Robert Peake described here was born in Brawley, California and raised in El Centro (Poets & Writers), moved to England in 2011, and writes at robertpeake.com.

Yes. In a 2008 contributor note for Rattle, Peake wrote that he "transferred out of computer engineering at U.C. Berkeley" to study poetry instead. He took his degree in English Literature there in 1999, then spent two decades as a technology leader. Crunchbase and Poets & Writers list, respectively, the technology career and the poetry career under the same person.

Robert Peake lives in Hertfordshire, England, near London. He was born in Brawley, California and grew up in El Centro, a farming town on the US–Mexico border, where his kindergarten class was taught half in English and half in Spanish. Poets & Writers lists him as fluent in Spanish. He moved to England in 2011 and later took British citizenship (Paul Stephenson interview, 2017).

PeakePro Ltd is Robert Peake's consultancy. He began the practice in Los Angeles in 2004 and incorporated the UK company on 21 May 2012. It is registered at Companies House as company number 08077541, with Robert Patrick Peake as a director from incorporation. It is a boutique operation offering organisational consulting, leadership coaching, effectiveness training and AI-effectiveness work.

Robert Peake helps individuals and organisations work more effectively, across three connected strands: research and advice on human–AI effectiveness; executive coaching and organisational consulting, including interim and fractional CTO work; and Getting Things Done® training through Next Action Associates, where he has been a Senior Consultant and Coach since August 2012. He has run his consultancy, PeakePro, as principal consultant and fractional CTO since 2004.

Robert Peake's coaching and consulting clients have included WarnerMedia (AT&T), ITV, Barclays, the Scottish Government, the University of Edinburgh and London Business School, alongside technology startups and small and mid-sized firms. Scott Joslin, Senior Vice President for International Data Strategy at WarnerMedia, has said: "Robert is amazing at getting teams to make things happen in the real world."

Robert Peake holds a B.A. in English Literature from the University of California, Berkeley (1999) and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Pacific University, Oregon (2009). He is a member of the International Coaching Federation and has coached executives for around a decade as a Senior Consultant and Coach at Next Action Associates, the certified GTD® partner for the UK and Ireland.

Robert Peake has held CTO-level roles for over two decades. He was interim CTO of TrustCommerce in 2004–05, then CTO of the David Allen Company from January 2005 to April 2011, and its Chief Information Officer from July 2008, as the youngest member and Secretary of its Executive Committee. He was then CTO of BraveNewTalent, where he grew the engineering team from four people to twenty, and in 2022 interim CTO of Rotageek. The full history is on his LinkedIn profile.

Both. Robert Peake's WordPress.org profile describes him as a "PHP developer since 2000" and a "Zend Certified Engineer", and records him as a former member of the PHP Development Team. He taught programming at the University of California, Berkeley's Self-Paced Center from 1997 to 1999, before his leadership career began.

Yes. Robert Peake's WordPress.org profile carries a Core Contributor badge for WordPress 5.5, a Plugin Developer badge and a Spanish Translation Contributor badge, and lists five published plugins. On GitHub he writes as cyberscribe, describes himself as a "Digital Humanist", maintains 34 public repositories and is an Arctic Code Vault Contributor; his most-starred project, d20datascience, explores statistical patterns in role-playing game mechanics.

Robert Peake says he has been involved with artificial intelligence since the 1990s. On the Next Action Associates podcast in 2023 he described having written neural networks and worked extensively on natural language processing. His Google Scholar profile, verified against a berkeley.edu address, lists his research interests as poetry, digital humanities, machine learning and computational linguistics.

Yes. Robert Peake has practised Getting Things Done® since 2000 and has delivered GTD seminars and one-to-one coaching as a Senior Consultant and Coach at Next Action Associates, the certified GTD® partner for the UK and Ireland, since August 2012. In 2020 he wrote "What I Learned From Doing 20 Years of GTD®" for them.

Robert Peake was CTO of the David Allen Company, which created and licenses the Getting Things Done® methodology, from January 2005 to April 2011, and its CIO from 2008. He now works at Next Action Associates, the firm the David Allen Company certified to deliver GTD training in the UK. In October 2024 he appeared alongside David Allen on GTD Connect episode #280, "GTD and Creative Expression".

Yes. Robert Peake co-hosts Change Your Game with GTD®, produced by Next Action Associates. Episodes cover applying GTD to leadership, life transitions and AI workflows. He has also been a guest on Countercurrent, the podcast of Professor Roger Kneebone of Imperial College London.

Robert Peake treats GTD as the discipline that makes AI workflows productive rather than as a separate topic. His argument is that AI amplifies whatever clarity you bring to it, so the value of having decided what "done" means, and of holding commitments outside your head, rises rather than falls. He set this out in "Clarity Is Everything in the Age of AI" (Next Action Associates, 2025).

Yes. Robert Peake coaches high-performing adults with ADHD, focusing on executive function, systems and structure, and on working with the way a person's attention actually behaves rather than against it. He has given a talk on GTD and ADHD, with slides. This is coaching, not clinical treatment, and he does not diagnose.

Robert Peake coaches executives and high-performing professionals across industries, with particular depth in engineering and technology leadership and in high-performing adults with ADHD. Sessions are confidential, one-to-one, typically an hour a week, held virtually. He describes his method as values-led performance coaching: identify meaningful outcomes, build structure, clear obstacles, mark progress.

As an interim or fractional CTO, Robert Peake provides senior technical and strategic judgement to companies that need it before they need a permanent hire, or during a leadership gap in a growth phase. He served as interim CTO of Rotageek from February to July 2022, working with the CEO and CPO to hire and retain engineers and prepare the ground for the incoming permanent CTO. He works the people and process side as much as the technology.

An engineering team health check is Robert Peake's diagnostic for software teams: a survey grounded in psychological flow theory, compared against a statistical sample, producing a report on individual and team dynamics with recommended next steps. He offers it alongside a technology health check reviewing tools and practices, and an "engineering success plan" built from surveys, interviews and workshops.

Robert Peake has two full-length collections from Nine Arches Press, The Knowledge (2015) and Cyclone (2018), plus the pamphlet The Silence Teacher (Poetry Salzburg, 2013) and Human Shade in New Poets | Short Books Volume V (Lost Horse Press, 2011). Poets & Writers records him as a finalist for the James Hearst Poetry Prize and the Rattle Poetry Prize, runner-up for the Indiana Review Poetry Prize, and an honourable mention in the Atlantic Monthly Student Writing Contest.

Robert Peake's poems have appeared in the North American Review, Poetry International, Magma Poetry, Iota and Rattle, among others; Poetry Salzburg lists him across six issues of its review. Cyclone was reviewed in London Grip by Adele Ward in 2019, and The Silence Teacher in Rattle by Michelle Bitting. World Literature Today maintains an author page for him, and his profile is in the Poets & Writers directory.

Transatlantic Poetry is an international online poetry reading series Robert Peake founded in 2013, pairing poets across the Atlantic in live broadcast readings; he curated it until 2017. He also makes film-poems with his wife Valerie Kampmeier, catalogued at Moving Poems, which have screened in the United States, the United Kingdom and Europe. He has tutored for the Poetry Society in Hertfordshire since 2015.

Robert Peake carves spoons, builds ukuleles, designs games, makes electronics and prints. He built a ukulele during the pandemic, as he told Professor Roger Kneebone on Countercurrent. In 2010, while living in Ojai, California, he wrote and read an elegy at a community memorial for a bear, reported by the Los Angeles Times.

Coaching with Robert Peake runs as confidential one-to-one sessions, typically an hour a week by video. Consulting engagements usually open with a discovery period. Organisational work often begins with an assessment, so the conversation starts from the client's data. To start a conversation, use his contact page.

Robert Peake says he is a poor fit for anyone seeking validation for a decision already made, or a technology recommendation without the organisational work that would make it stick. His coaching asks the client to bring an open mind, a learning attitude and a willingness to be honest.

Robert Peake can be reached through the contact form on his website, or on LinkedIn. He writes at robertpeake.com and on Substack, and publishes talks on YouTube.