About

I'm a VP Program Director in Columbus, Ohio, leading a 20+ person team at Assembly (part of Daniel J. Edelman Holdings) across a multi-workstream enterprise tech portfolio. Before that, I built the project management function across 8 APAC markets from Shenzhen. Across all of it, the work is integration... connecting cultures, functions, and the people being asked to use new technology.

I was raised between Taiwan and the US, and spent two years living and working in Shenzhen before coming back stateside. That biography is the operating system underneath everything else on this page.

I've spent 15 years building teams, functions, and systems across contexts most people don't get to see from the inside. I built the project management function across 8 APAC markets from Shenzhen, delivering contribution margins consistently 10 points above target. I've led integrated campaigns that earned a Cannes Gold Lion. I co-founded a classical music nonprofit that's now in its 11th year, four years after I stepped back from running it.

And I've spent more hours than I can count navigating what happens when Western operating models hit APAC contexts and everyone wonders why the playbook isn't working. (The playbook was never the problem.)

The common thread: walk into the room, figure out what's actually going on underneath what people are saying, and create the conditions for a cross-functional team to move forward together. Then get out of their way. The job is integration leader. It's just the thing I keep ending up doing.

The underlying work doesn't change much. What changes is the room I'm in.

In a delivery org, I build the operating function: governance, forecasting, margin discipline. That includes capacity forecasts close enough that we staffed off them, and burn forecasting on $6M+ business lines.

Across markets, I translate. In APAC that meant lining up 8 to 12 different sets of KPIs and decision habits until everyone was pointed the same way (and decoding what nobody was saying out loud).

Between strategy and execution, I turn a plan into the routines and tools teams run on every day. I helped shape the operating strategy for a $15M+ regional business, then built the model teams ran it on.

When AI shows up, I design the context so the tools fit how people already work. My own AI operating system runs across two very different domains: enterprise marketing communications and early childhood education. On one account, it made onboarding about 8x faster.

With people, I coach past what I call authorization anxiety... when someone knows exactly what to do but isn't sure they're allowed to. The goal is for the team to need me less. The classical music nonprofit I co-founded is in its 11th year, four years after I stepped back. That's the version of success I'm after.

Almost none of this started with a formal mandate. Most of it started with me noticing something was stuck and building the fix before anyone asked. (I've stopped apologizing for that.)

Today I work at the intersection of AI transformation and organizational change, the space where technology promises one thing and people experience something else entirely. There's a pattern underneath AI resistance that I keep finding across very different contexts. The same identity disruption shows up in veterans returning from deployment, executives approaching retirement, and mid-career professionals watching AI restructure the expertise they built their career around. It's not a technology problem. It's a "who am I now" problem. I call it the Identity Layer, and it's become the thesis that organizes most of what I write about here.

Clarity before speed. I once spent three days pushing back on a project timeline because the team was about to sprint toward a deliverable nobody had actually agreed on. We lost three days. We saved six weeks. That's the trade I'll make every time.

I translate between worlds: strategy and operations, creative and data, headquarters and the market three time zones away where the work actually happens. Most of the organizational friction I've encountered isn't really disagreement. It's different languages describing the same thing, and nobody in the room realizing it. I make them make sense to each other, and then I build the scaffolding so teams can keep moving after I leave the room.

Three kids in Ohio with my wife Megan. Photography is my creative outlet (Sony A7 IV, mostly studio portraits and whatever my kids are doing). The violins keep reminding me they deserve a tune-up.

This season I'm also a first-year volunteer hockey coach for my boys' teams, which has turned out to be the best AI lab I've got. 🏒

Field Notes! Field-tested thinking from the places where people and systems meet under pressure. What works, what breaks, what I got wrong before I got it right. Written the way I'd explain it to a sharp colleague over coffee.