About ME

This website is the result of three threads of my thinking coming together. The first thread is the simple belief that we should all have a digital presence to represent ourselves online. To date I have a disjointed, fragmentary presence at best. The second is another simple belief that the act of sharing has a more radical impact on the growth and development of the online world than it does on the physical one. I now think, in a way that I would never admit just a few years ago, that my creative output might be of greater value shared than private. The third is a less simple belief that all of our major industries manage their resources in the exact same way, that this way is not inevitable but is followed unconsciously as if it were, and that there is a different way which might be very much better in most cases. I call this different way Flow Design, and I am on a mission to define and describe it as clearly and completely as I can to help designers reshape the world.

Professionally, I have just celebrated my two year anniversary at Salesforce where I am an innovation and transformation leader. I admire the platform that the company has built over the last two decades but I admire even more the way it has built and continues to grow and nurture its network. We call it the Ohana, the Hawaiian word for family, and it is the most impressive feat of business ecosystem engineering that I have seen in my 30+ year career.

Upon graduating from Oxford University I joined the world of IT, first as a management consultant and then as a CIO, and left it after 20 years to pursue innovation and design thinking, as well as teaching at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and at the Institute of Design on a part time basis.  After another decade, joining Salesforce was a way for me to bring these two worlds, of technology and of innovation and creativity, together.

I spend too much time thinking about writing instead of actually writing. I try to spend a good amount of time being a very proud Dad to my two teenage sons. I spend not nearly enough time making art, making cheese, walking, diving or (especially) vacationing with my wife.

Innovation Articles

1. Business Ecosystems and Relationship Transformation:

• ZDNet, April 2018, “Five Practices for Building Business Ecosystems”

2. Innovation Culture and Practice:

• ZDNet, June 2018, How Companies Can Innovate at Scale
• Solve, July 2017, "Create An Innovation Culture"
• Huffington Post, November 2016, "Keeping Corporate Innovation Alive"
• Fast Co. Design, March 2012, “User Experience vs User Memory”
• Fast Co. Design, August 2011, “5 Ways Standardization Can Lead To Innovation”

3. Designing for Movement and Connectedness (Flow)

• ZDNet July 2018: Flow based Organizational Design Accelerates Digital Transformation
• Huffington Post, February 2017 "Movement - the Ultimate Status Symbol"
• LinkedIn, July 2014  Flow by Design 1"
• LinkedIn, July 2014 "Flow by Design 2"

4. Innovation and Disruption Theory

• Businessweek.com, March 2010, “Nature’s Disruptive Innovators”