I've spent my career answering the same question: how do organizations built for today adapt their strategies, products, and people for tomorrow?
I believe the role of people in business will be to explore questions about the future while the operation of the present gets increasingly automated. That requires a uniquely human agency, which has atrophied over time. I'm working to rebuild that agency in both people and organizations.
I do this through consulting, teaching, writing, advising, and speaking.
I started my career as a strategy consultant at Accenture, and left because the work never required me to truly understand anything. After a stint on the founding team of a mobile messaging startup, I spent a decade at ?What If! Innovation, becoming Managing Director and Futures Practice Lead and helping organizations like Disney, Google, FedEx, AB InBev, CHANEL, and JetBlue find their next directions for growth.
When Accenture acquired ?What If! in 2019, I helped lead the integration, and saw from the inside how an organization built for reliable answers struggles to make room for new questions. That experience, and the writing I did to make sense of it, shaped everything I do now.
The constants are chasing my ice hockey glory years on any rink or pond that will have me and improving my skills as a private pilot. Everything else turns over about every three months, following my latest curiosity.
Interested in working together? Just catching up? Please reach out — always happy to chat.
Thanks — I'll be in touch.
Agency is a transformation company named after what it builds in people and organizations. We work alongside client teams on their most pressing strategic initiatives, pairing our oldest tool, human agency, with our newest, AI, to reach outcomes that weren't possible before.
I founded it because, across fifteen years of client work, what lasted was never the deliverable. It was the understanding clients' teams built along the way, which motivated and enabled them to execute long after we left. As AI continues to lower constraints on accessing and analyzing information, helping to build that understanding has become the most valuable thing an outside partner can offer.
I teach the next generation of business leaders the critical thinking they need to have agency in their careers. Many will enter organizations built to reward reliable answers and analytical thinking, at the moment AI makes answers cheap.
So I ask students to recognize that the processes and tools taught are not a replacement for thinking, and challenge them to experience what is. Critical thinking is a disposition before it's a skill, and a classroom is one of the few places to practice it without a quarterly deadline.
I write to understand what's changing before I have a position on it. The essays that come out of that process become the foundation for how I work with clients and students, and I publish them, irregularly, on Productively Contrarian to show my thinking and hold myself to it.
Readers are welcome, if not the point.
I advise companies and boards on the decisions that set future direction: where the next wave of growth comes from, how to transform without breaking the core, which new products deserve the bet, and what the future demands of the business today. I take on a small number of engagements, focused on judgment over deliverables.
AI commoditizes information, analysis and answers. What's left is understanding, the uniquely human ability to make sense of it all and act. Why it's the one expertise that outlasts every tool, and how organizations can build it.
Businesses are built to scale reliable answers, and AI now does that work for them. The result is a reckoning decades in the making. What it takes to design an organization where people genuinely want to think.
Strategy consulting was built to broker expertise, and AI has made expertise abundant. What leaders should now expect from outside partners, and what consultancies must become to provide it.