About
A BIT ABOUT ME
I’ve worked in four start-ups and repeatedly built new things inside large organizations. I’ve had the good fortune, and the bloody knees, to work on technologies while the industries around them were still being invented. Each time, I learned my way into the next system.
Today, I split my time among research, advising, writing, and teaching at the intersection of technology, behavior, and governance. I help leaders move fast without moving blindly.
Teaching
I’ve taught EMBA courses at Washington State for almost ten years, and guest lectured at the University of Washington iSchool. At Seattle University, I’m developing a Business Analytics capstone that helps students learn how data work actually gets done inside organizations, not just how analysis gets done.
Advising & Training
Dative.works helps leaders and teams work through the human side of transformation: data and AI governance, culture, literacy, decision-making, and the organizational conditions that determine whether a good idea survives contact with reality.
My workshops and advisory work are research-based and practical. The aim is not another playbook. It is better judgment when the answer is not obvious.
Research + Writing
I write about data, technology, leadership, power, and institutional judgment.
My books include Driving Data Projects and Driving Your Self-Discovery, and I publish current research and commentary through Lead With Alignment.
Across all of it, I’m interested in the same problem: what happens between the system we design and the human judgment required to make it work.
I learned much of what I know by doing the work, getting some of it wrong, and figuring out what happened. I try to make that learning more useful and less costly for others.
What people are saying…
Want to get start working purposefully on a new project? Here’s a template for getting started.
Take the course and modernize your practice of running data projects (coming soon!).
Hire me to speak at your next event. Check out the available talks and workshops in my calendar or email to book me.
Why Dative?
In grammar, the dative case marks the recipient of something given, taught, or told. It’s a quiet structure of generosity—used when something is offered for the benefit of another. That’s what leadership is, too: the transmission of meaning, responsibility, and care.
We chose Dative because, at its core, leadership is an act of transmission through which others benefit directly and indirectly from our actions.
Dative.works exists to help people build systems that remember that.
Because values don’t scale on their own, they have to be intentionally designed in.
HOW I GOT HERE
BEGINNINGS
West Hartford → elsewhere
Born in West Hartford, Connecticut, and gone by six. We moved enough afterward that “where are you from?” has never had a particularly simple answer.
WORK STARTED EARLY
High School + College
My first jobs included professional gift wrapping, produce work in a family deli, a marketing call center, and Laura Ashley. Dressage and fencing sound grand. I mucked stalls for riding time and worked to pay for fencing gear and competitions.
What appealed to me was discipline, judgment, and the satisfaction of getting better at something difficult.
AN ENGLISH MAJOR MEETS ETHERNET
College Internship: Boston
A recession and one year left in college pushed my electives toward technology. I landed a paid internship at Chipcom, helping build the networking infrastructure that would make the commercial internet possible.
1995: LEARNING THE WEB w/o A MANUAL
Coding through my tears: Boston + New York
I learned HTML, Flash, Adobe graphics tools, and ColdFusion mostly by making things and figuring out why they broke.
“Webmaster” was still a plausible job title. Start-ups appeared, merged, and vanished while advertising tried to figure out what the web was for.
THE INTERVIEW I ALMOST BLEW
First real job with real apartment: New York
Three start-ups behind me and literally one dollar left in my pocket, I interviewed with Seth Godin at Yoyodyne.
I was failing the interview. I realized it while it was happening, changed course, and got the job.
YAHOO! / THE MICROSERF YEARS
Late 1990s: One-way ticket to California
An acquisition took me west into early online advertising, personalization, and e-commerce.
Coupland’s Microserfswasn’t far off: smart people, absurd hours, work and friendship tangled together, and the sincere feeling that we were inventing the future.
2000: WHEN THE INTERNET STARTED MOVING
Streaming media, Microsoft, and another industry being invented
At RealNetworks, I helped bring video into the player, then became the server division’s first product manager as streaming moved from novelty toward infrastructure.
Then I was laid off.
MY WALKING MBA
Microsoft, Starbucks, US Navy: enterprise transformation
Microsoft taught me how large organizations move in real life: budgets, politics, data, governance, operations, incentives, executive sponsorship, and the distance between a good idea and an organization capable of carrying it out.
I learned much about Driving Data Projects there. It was a live case study.
2010: BACK TO SCHOOL!
Putting language around what I had seen (and done)
Graduate study gave me a different way to examine problems I had already encountered in organizations.
That work eventually became my doctorate and research into values drift: how institutions move away from what they say matters.
ANOTHER SET OF LEVERS
Leadership consulting
For about a decade, I worked across executive coaching, leadership development, workforce strategy, and data.
Sometimes the lever was technology. Sometimes it was culture, literacy, training, judgment, or leadership. The early thinking behind Driving Your Self-Discovery began here.
TEACHING IT
Graduate classroom
You don’t know it if you can’t explain it.
Nearly a decade teaching graduate students forced me to learn another discipline: making complicated organizational and data problems understandable without oversimplifying them.
2020: CULTURE IS INFRASTRUCTURE TOO
SALESFORCE → elsewhere
At Salesforce, I worked on data culture and literacy at enterprise scale.
It reinforced something I had been seeing for years: systems don’t operate apart from culture, authority, incentives, judgment, and the people expected to make them work.
Then came another layoff.
WRITING IT DOWN
After Salesforce, I turned accumulated experience into keynotes, workshops, professional development seminars, and books. Driving Data Projects captured much of the operating knowledge I'd spent years acquiring. Driving Your Self-Discovery followed quickly, turning from the system toward the person inside it: judgment, adaptation, reflection, and culture.
NOW
The questions got bigger
My work now sits at the intersection of data, technology, organizational systems, power structures, and human judgment. AI looks like a new chapter. After nearly three decades of technological change, some of the underlying questions feel remarkably familiar.