The Team

This is some text inside of a div block.

Embodied leadership
‍

We partner with founders, families, and long-horizon investors to cultivate embodied leadership — the kind that sustains performance, builds aligned teams, and supports both human and planetary flourishing..
‍

VORTEX

This work has been evolving for nearly four decades. It began in 1985 during a three-month wilderness leadership expedition in Alaska — where one insight became clear: transformation does not begin with strategy, but with state.
‍
What became undeniable was that the deepest growth was not driven by tactics alone, but by each person’s state of mind, quality of relationships, and capacity to fully release into presence and play. In the wilderness, leadership revealed itself not as control, but as awareness — and the joy of being fully alive, attuned, and in flow with nature.

VORTEX

Over the decades that followed, this insight matured through work at the highest levels of global leadership. As a pioneering C-suite executive search advisor across Asia, deep partnerships were built with founders, investors, and enterprise leaders navigating growth, scale, and succession.
Yet alongside success came a pattern: extraordinary external achievement often coexisted with internal fragmentation. The state of clarity and flow discovered in Alaska was increasingly difficult to sustain amid travel, capital pressure, and relentless expansion.
Vortex emerged not as an escape from leadership — but as a laboratory for strengthening it. A place to recalibrate nervous systems, restore coherence, and reconnect high-performing leaders to the state from which their best decisions are made.

VORTEX

In 2016, these threads formally converged into Vortex — integrating Eastern and Western philosophy, executive advisory experience, and modern leadership science into a unified embodied-leadership framework.
Over time, this framework evolved further into Surfing the Tsunami — a practical system for cultivating adaptive, regulated, and coherent leadership in the age of AI. What began as an exploration of personal transformation matured into a platform for founder development, team alignment, and long-horizon value creation.

Vortex Ignite

2–6 February 2020
A Vortex retreat in the lush tropical forest of the Riviera Maya in Quintana Roo, México

Vortex Ignite Riviera Maya

A transformational journey like no other.
‍
Watch our video showcasing our 2020 Vortex Ignite retreat in Costa Rica to get a sense of what Vortex Adventures retreats feel like
‍
More about Riviera Maya

REFER A FRIEND

Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.

REFER A FRIEND

Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.

about Chris Traub

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Suspendisse varius enim in eros elementum tristique. Duis cursus, mi quis viverra ornare, eros dolor interdum nulla, ut commodo diam libero vitae erat. Aenean faucibus nibh et justo cursus id rutrum lorem imperdiet. Nunc ut sem vitae risus tristique posuere.

Chris Traub is the founder of SES and Vortex, and the creator of the Embodied Leadership framework that underpins Surfing the Tsunami. Raised in Connecticut until age sixteen, Chris spent a formative year as an exchangestudent in the Southern Philippines in 1979 — an experience that awakened alifelong commitment to travel, cross-cultural immersion, and living beyond thepredictable path.

He began studying Mandarin at Oberlin College in 1982 and first lived in Taiwan from 1983–84, studing Mandarin, ocean sailing, trekking in Neal, and beginning what would become a decades-long bridge between East and West. 

In 1985, Chris completed a three-month wilderness leadership expedition in Alaska with the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS). That experience - immersion in uncertainty, team and self-reliance, and the insporational power of magestic nature - became a quiet through-line in his life and leadership philosophy.

He earned degrees in Anthropology and East Asian Studies in 1986, and then returned to Taiwan to begin his career. In 1988, he founded Strategic Executive Search Group (SES), one of Asia’s pioneering executive search firms

Over the past 38 years to-date, Chris has built a trusted global executive search and human capital advisory practice supporting the world's largest enterprises,  founders and multi-generational family enterprises, and long-horizon investors —particularly in the technology sector.

From the outset, Chris has engaged deeply with global leadership communities, cultivating long-standing relationships with accomplished executives, investors, and builders worldwide, building powerful trust relationships.

In 2012, he expanded into venture building and long-horizon advisory work, supporting growth companies navigating complexity and scale.

In 2016, Chris and his partners founded Vortex — a global leadership transformation firm designed to help leaders go deep into themeselves through transformative adventure retreats - where they would build aligned community while transforming their own lives to find greater joy and thriving.
‍
Through this work, Chris articulated the Vortex Principles: an embodied guide to leading with coherence under pressure. His thought leaderships frameworks have continued to evolve since then through the Forgiveness Mantra (2019), the Joy Protocol (2022) - and most recently through Surfing theTsunami: Embodied Leadership in the Age of AI (2025) — a practical yet deeply human approach to building resilient leaders and enduring organizations in an era of accelerating technological change. 

Chris and his wife of 40 years live in Taipei and have three adult children. He continues to travel extensively globally — drawn to majestic wilderness, bespoke cultural, deeply aligned community, consciousness practices, and the integration of spirit and enterprise in service of human and planetary flourishing.