Writing
I spent thirty years helping other people find the words. Now I’m making room to follow some ideas of my own.
I’ve written for other people for most of my career: executive messages, transformation stories, speeches, websites, employee communications, press releases, marketing copy, television and radio commercials, and playbooks.
The language changed with the assignment, but the work was remarkably consistent: understand what someone was trying to say, find the meaning inside the complexity, and help it reach another human being intact.
I’ve also spent years on the other side of publishing, marketing college textbooks and designing or illustrating nearly three dozen book covers. I understood how books were positioned, packaged, and introduced to readers long before I considered putting my own name on one.
Writing long-form work under my own name is newer. It gives me room to follow an idea beyond the immediate assignment—to test it against experience, connect it with other ideas, and ask whether something learned in one organization might be useful to people in another.
My first book
But So What...
Turning Narrative Into Meaningful Change
Transformation efforts rarely suffer from a lack of activity. Plans are built. Messages are delivered. Milestones are tracked. Yet the story connecting all that work can still break.
But So What... explores six places where that commonly happens: resistance is misunderstood, momentum disappears in the long middle, direct managers are left without language, audiences change, leaders turn over, and the original business case loses its meaning.
Drawing on thirty years across design, communication, user experience, and organizational change, the book makes a practical argument: narrative is not decoration added to a transformation. It is the structure that helps people understand what is changing, why it matters, what the middle will feel like, and who they can become on the other side.
What I’m working on now
I’m currently writing about leadership, communication, and what happens when people have to move before certainty arrives.
Some of the work examines how leaders help people find their bearings during change. Other pieces explore the recurring patterns beneath technological disruption—from print and desktop publishing to the internet and AI. All of it returns to one enduring question:
How does an idea inside one human mind become something another human can understand and act on?
The work is still taking shape. I’ll share field notes, early ideas, and occasional excerpts here as it develops.
Heading Press
Heading Press is the publishing home I’m building for this work: books, field notes, and practical ideas about leadership, communication, and navigating uncertainty.
More soon.