Building Tér.
Thirty years of coaching
behind it.
Hungarian by birth, based in Saigon since 2018.
Zsolt is the founder of Tér, an AI thinking partner for decision-makers. He built it on thirty years as an executive coach and corporate trainer, and on a stubborn belief that most professional problems are not really professional problems. They are clarity problems wearing a suit.
His coaching is grounded in the constructive-developmental tradition of Robert Kegan and Jennifer Garvey Berger. His training rooms tend to be loud, irreverent, and surprisingly quiet at the right moments.
Tér is where all of it comes together: thirty years of sitting across from leaders, turned into a thinking partner that is there at eleven at night, when the coach is not. He still coaches, still runs DecisionLab, and writes literary fiction in Hungarian, which turns out to be excellent training in listening for what people are not saying.
Thirty years of asking the question people hoped to avoid.
The polite version is "what are you actually deciding here?" The less polite version is whatever it takes to cut through the story they are telling themselves.
Zsolt trained as a corporate trainer in the early 2000s, moved into executive coaching, and never went back. His work sits in the constructive-developmental tradition, which is a long way of saying he is more interested in how people see than in what they do. The "what they do" tends to take care of itself once the "how they see" shifts.
He is Hungarian. He has lived in Ho Chi Minh City since 2018, and runs the Vietnam side of Ember Associates from there. His clients are mostly senior, mostly stuck on something they cannot quite name. He works in English, Hungarian, and the occasional moment of useful silence.
He trained with Marshall Goldsmith and Jennifer Garvey Berger, and completed a two-year coach certification with Harvard's Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey. He has worked with Heineken, Shell, General Motors, and a long list of companies whose names appear in the next section. None of that is the most interesting thing about him.
He distilled the methodology into DecisionLab, a one-day experiential workshop that uses poker as a simulator for high-stakes decision-making. Then he distilled it further into Tér, an AI-powered thinking partner now working with its first organisations. One of the first leaders to use it, on a real acquisition decision, started calling it "Decision Zsolt." He did not come up with that. The user did.
In parallel he is finishing his first novel, Azonos, an experimental work of Hungarian literary fiction about business self-deception and the strange ways people stay asleep at the wheel. Same obsession, different door.
If there is a thread through all of it, it is a quiet allergy to performance and a long love affair with clarity. He thinks most people are smarter than they are getting credit for, and he tends to bet on them.
Where the work has lived. Some of it, anyway.
The same obsession. Different ways in.
If you have something you cannot quite name, that is usually a good sign. Reach out.