At-a-glance

I lead transformation initiatives, especially related to the adoption of new human capital technology, through an uncommon blend of abilities in analytics and storytelling.

I’ve held a variety of roles over my career. But whether I served as a Leadership & Communications Consultant, Service Excellence Fellow, SVP Strategy, SVP Marketing, or VP Growth & Innovation, the job was always the same: help shepherd an organization into a new reality.

Activating HCM Transformations

HR & Recruiting are being disrupted (again), and this time, AI-powered Work Tech may just finish what the internet and social media started. Because if the internet made information easy to access, and social media made people easy to access, AI now makes it all work like magic.

Get this next transformation right, and your company could achieve advantages in efficiency, market insights, and speed that are orders of magnitude beyond your competitors. But get it wrong, and you could unleash an employee revolt, invite government oversight into your industry, or possibly cannibalize your whole business.

Successfully activating new Work Tech so that it yields a positive, sustained ROI, with minimal risk, requires 4 things:

1. Knowledge of the business strategy, the mechanics of transformation, and human capital management.

2. The ability to convert that knowledge into the right strategy using the right analytics.

3. The ability to communicate that strategy clearly.

4. The willingness to stick with the work of transformation until the job is done.

For over 25 years, I’ve helped organizations large and small activate meaningful transformations.

Product & Marketing Leadership

In 2014, I decided to step away from consulting, roll up my sleeves, do all the things I was talking about.

At the time, companies needed help capturing the benefits of social media, and I was running a boutique firm that had been selected to be LinkedIn’s 1st certified consulting partner in North America. So I used what I’d learned from working with tens of thousands of people to develop a SaaS product that would activate employee advocacy.

Even better: we quickly learned that the “data exhaust” from this product could be used to crowdsource employer brands that were just as accurate—yet much easier and faster to develop—as agency-crafted ones.

A company was born.

That company, Brand Amper, was named one of HRTech’s “Awesome New Start-ups” the year it launched and was acquired by TheMuse.com less than three years later.

This was just one of a string of innovations I’ve developed and/or helped bring to market in the Human Capital Management space during my career.

The Passion Project: Comfort Communications

Many of my innovations are born from personal experience. This one is at the top of that list.

In 2018, I lost my daughter, Elle. Despite working for one of the Best Places to Work at the time, grief support was a gap for the company. It’s still a gap today, even for even the “best” organizations, yet is needed more than ever.

Comfort Communications is a simple framework that helps teams show up for a grieving teammate, and enables companies to provide a more predictable, consistent, equitable, and human responses when grief and loss events disrupt work.

The Brilliance Within, How to Self-Destruct, & Super Staying Power

The Brilliance Within is my weekly LinkedIn newsletter on topics and perspectives that deserve a voice, especially related to leading organizations through this time of deep change.

I speak with leadership teams about how to stay in front of a fast-changing technological landscape, and with teams-at-large about how to keep technology in the service of people, as opposed to in place of them.

I’ve also published two career books, How to Self-Destruct & Super Staying Power.