Before
The military taught me about systems under pressure
Not the discipline part. What stayed with me was watching how groups behave when the plan stops matching reality — and who they listen to when it does.
I didn't set out to study change. It kept following me.
For more than fifteen years I've sat with entrepreneurs, researchers and large organizations at the moment where an idea meets reality. Some of those ideas became companies. Some quietly disappeared. What held my attention was never the idea, but the difference between the two.
Eventually I noticed that everything I was drawn to was pointing at one question: how do people, ideas and organizations create meaningful change? I stopped keeping those subjects in separate boxes, and the work got considerably more interesting.
I haven't solved it. I've collected enough experience and honest mistakes to be useful company while you work on your version of it.
Five turns, not a straight line
Then
Building companies, and learning what I didn't know
Founding, selling, failing and starting again. Every venture answered a question I hadn't thought to ask before I started it.
After
Fifteen years with founders and researchers
Innovation advising and research commercialization: thousands of conversations with people trying to turn something promising into something real.
Alongside
Stages, and the discipline of saying it clearly
Speaking internationally forced me to test whether my thinking survived being said out loud to people with no obligation to agree.
Now
One question underneath all of it
Innovation, entrepreneurship, leadership, AI, sustainability, coaching — the same question kept appearing. So I stopped treating them as separate subjects.
