About
The storms never stop. Neither do I.
Decades of mergers, hurricanes, and constant change taught me everything I know about leading humans through the storm. Here's the story.
Banking
As Vice President at Bank of America, I was part of a merger every two years. The last was the first tri-state banking merger in U.S. banking history. Mergers and acquisitions are, by their nature, a numbers business. The spreadsheets get all the attention. The humans rarely do.
What made these mergers particularly challenging was the weight of constraints. Teams didn't get to choose which systems they would use, which products would survive, which locations would stay open. The decisions came from above and the people on the ground had to find a way to move forward inside them. For most leaders those constraints became walls. For me they became the roadmap to success.
When I approached change with empathy first, defined the real challenge together with my teams, and co-created the path forward within the constraints we were given, something shifted. People didn't just survive the chaos. They found purpose inside it. My teams didn't just hit their numbers. They topped the percentile rankings. Not despite the disruption. But because of how we moved through it together.
That was the foundation. I just didn't have a name for it yet.
The Revelation
After a couple of decades in the financial industry, I tried my hand at entrepreneurship. A few times. None of them quite fit. So I did something I had never done before. I turned the coaching certifications I had been using with others on myself.
A certification in Simon Sinek's Start With Why framework invited me to study something I had never examined before — when I was doing my best work, having the greatest impact, and feeling the most joy all at the same time. The pattern that emerged was unmistakable. The way I naturally process challenges, lead teams, and solve problems had a name. It was design thinking. I had been practicing it my entire career without knowing it.
I immediately enrolled in a postgraduate program in Innovation and Design Thinking through Emeritus Institute of Management, developed in collaboration with MIT, Columbia Business School, and Tuck at Dartmouth. When I graduated I found almost no one writing about design thinking as a leadership practice. I found one article, the Harvard Business Review's Design Thinking Comes of Age, that reflected what I knew to be true. That became my focus. It still is.
The Mountains
I spent three decades in Southwest Florida. In that time I lived through 11 hurricanes and 10 tropical storms. Storms became a normal part of life. You watched, you prepared, and you weathered what came.
But every vacation, every free moment, I found myself drawn to the mountains of Western North Carolina. When Hurricane Ian devastated Southwest Florida in 2022, the worst storm in a century, we didn't just evacuate. We moved. We chose the mountains.
A year later, Hurricane Helene swept through Western North Carolina and caused the worst flooding this region had seen in over a hundred years. Thirty minutes from our home.
What a lifetime of storms teaches you is this: you cannot outrun them. You can only face them with clarity, preparation, and the right people beside you. That is exactly how I approach the challenges my clients are navigating right now. The AI disruption. The workforce uncertainty. The change initiatives that keep stalling. I've been in the storm before. I know what steady looks like from inside it.
The mountains are where I think most clearly. They are where I bring leaders to do the same.
Human Score
Human Score started with a conversation with Perry Knoppert, a colleague from The Octopus Movement. In Europe there is a Nutri-Score, a simple rating that tells you at a glance how healthy a food product is. Perry's question was elegant: what if organizations had a score that showed how human-centered they were? How healthy they were for the humans inside them?
He connected with Clif Lewis, whose academic rigor gave the idea its scientific foundation. I joined the launch team and was named the CEO. It was the perfect convergence of lived experience, passion, and purpose. The Human Score measures what most organizations have never measured, the organizational conditions underneath every initiative, every AI pilot, every change effort that succeeds or fails based on how well it was designed around the people doing the work.
If your organization is in the middle of its own storm, and most are, I'd like to be the conversation you have before you launch the next initiative, hire the next consultant, or run the next change management campaign.
The answers are already in the room. I help you find them.