WORK
WORK
I GET THINGS MOVING.
I GET THINGS MOVING.
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Most problems don't arrive neatly packaged.
They're tangled up in people, history, incentives, competing priorities, incomplete information, and sometimes a little chaos.
That's usually where I'm most useful.
I don't need to own the problem.
I need to understand it.
What's really happening?
What's missing?
What's possible?
How can I be useful?
THE METHOD
THE METHOD
01 —SEE THE ROOM
Before trying to solve anything, I want to understand the room.
Not just the org chart.
Who people listen to. What's driving the decision. What's being said. What's not.
At AEHF, that meant learning enough about spacecraft operations to understand what engineers and operators were seeing—and turn it into something senior leaders could use.
At SEAMLS, the same instinct played out at institutional scale.
Listen first. Figure out what's really going on.
02 —FIND THE OPENING
Once I understand the problem, I look for where something can move.
Sometimes it's technical.
Sometimes it's a relationship.
Sometimes it's a question nobody has framed quite right.
Sometimes it's a place.
I tend to ask three things:
Is it worthwhile?
Does it need to happen?
Is it viable?
If the answer is yes, there's usually somewhere to start.
03 —BRING PEOPLE IN
A surprising amount of good work is already sitting in plain sight.
The people are there.
They're just not always in the same room.
I've spent a lot of time creating reasons for them to be.
A student and an engineer.
An entrepreneur and a college president.
A defense contractor and a startup.
An artist and a technologist.
The point isn't networking.
It's collision.
04 —STAY WITH IT
The first version is rarely the final version.
Institutions resist.
Funding changes.
People disagree.
The original container doesn't fit.
That's not necessarily a reason to stop.
Sometimes you change the plan.
Sometimes you change the room.
Sometimes you change the building.
You hold onto the vision without being precious about how you get there.
Trust the process.
Do the work.
Let the results speak.
05 —MAKE IT REAL
Ideas are cheap.
I like the part where they have to survive contact with reality.
A satellite has to get to orbit.
A program has to work.
A contract has to hold.
A building has to open.
People have to actually show up.
The thing has to exist outside the conversation about the thing.
That's where I like to work.
UNTIL SOMETHING REAL EXISTS.
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