I lead teams at the intersection of strategy & design.
I start fires (the good kind).

The man who runs naked across a football field certainly disrupts, but he does not change the rules of the game. The whole notion of disruption is adolescent: It assumes that after the teenagers make a mess, the adults will come and clean it up. But there are no adults. We own this mess.

Sometimes institutions are deprived of vitality and function, turned into a simulacrum of what they once were, so that they gird the new order rather than resisting it.

Since non-believers don’t invent the future and speculators are always on a hustle, I often turn to practitioners to get a fix on the coordinates of reality. It has always helped me maintain a sense of pragmatic optimism when the rest of the world around me seems either overtly hyperbolic or depressingly pessimistic.

people are rushing too quickly into hyped technology not understanding how to best use the tech. We’ve seen this throughout history with naive database implementations in the 1980s, the dot-com bust of the late ’90s, and the mobile web of the early 2000s. Whenever there is hype, we shuffled into the easy path, forcing the tech into the product without understanding its weaknesses. We are more worried about being left behind than actually doing something of value. We get there eventually, but only after understanding that we were asking the wrong questions. So many companies fail figuring this out.

Gunpowder’s explosive force relies on combustion, effectively a very fast form of burning, which makes it easy to detonate with a lit fuse. But nitroglycerin does not burn. Its power derives from supersonic shock waves generated by atoms of oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon rearranging themselves to form more stable bonds after a physical disturbance.

starting with business-level impact in mind doesn’t mean you are putting your customers last. It means that you are putting the commercial relationship between your business and your customers front and center, and letting that relationship guide how you learn about and build solutions for your customers.