I’ve always been wired to move.
I’ve spent most of my career in rooms where something important wasn’t moving.
Not because the people weren’t capable. Not because the strategy was wrong. Usually it was the opposite. Capable people, clear strategy, real investment, and something invisible getting in the way of all of it.
There’s a specific pattern that happens in those situations. Organizations start measuring the symptoms. They track where the friction is, run reports on the pain points, hold meetings about the meetings that aren’t producing results. They’re reading wound analytics, the data that tells you where it hurts, not what’s causing it. And the more effort goes into the wound, the more invisible the actual constraint becomes.
I come in and read what the data isn’t saying.
I’ve been doing this for over twenty years. At Toyota a webpage redesign became a cross-functional infrastructure project once I saw the real scope. $150K in annual savings and half the internal collection time. At Comenity I interviewed 40 stakeholders across a platform fractured across 50 client brands before making a single recommendation. The presenting problem was inconsistency. The actual problem was that sales, product, and operations had never agreed on what the product was. At Heineken I was embedded inside the US CEO’s R&D function navigating regulatory complexity and internal politics to pioneer something that had never been done. They built a global role around the work.
The pattern across MetLife, AB InBev, Nestle, and Hanes is the same. Someone brings me in for one thing. I find the real thing. We move.
The same patterns show up everywhere I’ve worked. I see it in mid-market organizations across the US and in the companies I advise on US market entry through New Zealand Trade and Enterprise. The constraint changes. The dynamic doesn’t.
What makes that possible isn’t industry knowledge. I’ve worked across enough industries to know that’s rarely what’s missing. It’s the ability to see across functions, read what’s actually happening in a room, and say the thing that capable people inside the system are too close to say clearly. Then stay until it moves.
The other piece is harder to put on a resume. I co-founded a brewery, ran it for seven years under real financial and partner pressure, and exited through a structured buyout when it became clear my partners and I had fundamentally different ideas about what we were building. I co-own an independent cinema in Connecticut that my wife and I deliberately pivoted when the market shifted and a third of our competitors closed. I’ve been on the other side of every conversation I now have with organizational leaders. That changes what you’re willing to say and what you’re actually able to hear.
Most organizations are further from their own ceiling than they realize. If you want to know where yours is and what’s between you and it, I’d like to have that conversation.