A History of Thinking Ahead
From the advent of the personal computer, to a once-in-a-lifetime meeting with Steve Jobs as an impressionable 22 year-old, to a foray into fashion that surprisingly translated to app design, my career has been about creating things where there had been nothing before. Identifying new markets, then building companies and designing the one-of-a-kind products and go-to-market strategies to address them.
When I’m not starting a company myself, I’ve been asked by others to shake things up from the inside out. I've consulted for brands including The Coca Cola Company, Disney, AT&T, Cingular, Deloitte, IHG, Verifone, Turner Broadcasting, IBM, Lucent Technologies, Volkswagen, Federal Express, Prudential, BMW, Bank of America, and GE.
Adjacent Lab
Rethinking business, products, and marketing with a modern, human-first approach.
BUSINESS DESIGN
+ THINKING
Where are you on the digital transformation spectrum? Whether you're a tech company or figuring out how to leverage tech, I can help bring an innovative, human-first approach to better serve customers and employees in this new work-from-anywhere world.
LET’S GET DOWN
TO YOUR BUSINESS
How should your product or service change to meet your customer’s evolving needs? How do you better tune in to their feature requests or make crucial design and technical decisions? Or maybe just make it more visually interesting and immersive?
PRODUCT DESIGN
+ THINKING
Need a brand refresh to more effectively communicate to a changing market? I’m working with a syndicate of creatives with design, video, and marketing skills that have produced award-winning work for brands big and small.
BRANDING/
MARKETING THINKING
A History of Thinking Ahead—publishing 2023
This book is a collection of cautionary tales from my career of being an entrepreneur centering around the travails of having big ideas and trying to make them happen ahead of their time. Some excerpts follow.
IBM PC, Meeting the Mac (and Steve)
To say this was the earliest stages of PC is putting it lightly. This was green screen. Menu driven.
I started Software Dynamics, Inc. with a fraternity brother, Mike Nixon, developing custom software for the IBM PC. This was the earliest stages of bringing software to the desktop and SDI, as we were known, got our auspicious start developing accounting software for a customer that built burial vaults.
​
Designing at the intersection of fashion and technology
Gap had just reinvented cotton pants but I saw an opportunity with the performance qualities of synthetics. Particularly for sports.
After I left my first entrepreneurial venture, I was considering going to work for Apple but things weren’t going so well for them then. Not only did they have a hiring freeze, the Mac was ahead of its time and Steve had just been fired. I was 23 and thinking “ok, now what?”
Turning communications into learning
We didn't know if people were actually learning anything.
In the late 1990s I found myself working with huge brands — Ford, BMW — with large, diverse audiences ranging from geographically disbursed car dealerships to engineers, distributors, all of the way to individual service technicians.
I was helping them meet their biggest challenge, education.
The iPhone and me, love at first sight
The Useful app was looking to replace paper in the field.
When the iPhone launched in 2007, I knew I was seeing something different. and it was going to change everything. That's easy to go back and say when the impact of the iPhone on the world is undisputed so I guess I'll just have to ask you to go along with me here for a bit. I mean, Apple had figured out how to shrink down an entire operating system to fit on a phone.
It wasn't a phone anymore, it was a computer.