About Me

What are the invisible forces that shape our assumptions about success at work? How do organizations — knowingly or unknowingly — shape our beliefs, our identities, and our sense of what's professionally good and bad? And why do organizations that genuinely want to be human-centered still fail to see and address the structural foundations that keep work human-second?

I've been living inside those questions for 25 years. They didn't start as research questions. They started as experience.

I entered organizational life the way most people do — with genuine enthusiasm and some useful naivety. I wanted to succeed, contribute meaningfully, be recognized for good work. I looked for identity in achievement, for worth in performance, for belonging in the culture I was asked to join.

What I didn't understand then, and spent years developing the language to name, is that the rules I was learning weren't neutral. They carried assumptions about what success looks like, who earns recognition, and what kind of person is worth investing in. I participated in culture initiatives, supported DEI efforts, tried to lead in ways that felt human. All genuine attempts. But the dissonance persisted because those efforts addressed what was visible. But what was producing the dissonance operated at a different level entirely: in the inherited structures, unexamined standards, and moral weight attached to certain kinds of performance that no initiative was designed to reach. Those foundations don't get named without an outsider perspective and critical examination.

I'm a technology strategy and transformation consultant. I've worked inside organizations in times of stress and change: crisis from large errors that impact clients, product deployment failures, mergers, large-scale implementations. Twenty-five years inside these systems, watching the same patterns reproduce across different organizations, different industries, different leaders. What stayed consistent wasn't the culture or the people, it was the performance. The pleasing, the conforming, the managing of impressions. Adaptive behavior that was rewarded without ever being named. And underneath it, the same questions: why does this feel required? What is the power dynamic that produces it? What would a more honest exchange actually look like?

I am neurodivergent. That makes the performance dimension of organizational life especially visible to me: the impression management, the self-promotion, the performing of professional worth as if for a grade or applause. The things neurotypical workers absorb more automatically I had to learn consciously, which meant I could see them. That visibility became a lens.

That tension between what I was living and what I couldn't yet name didn't produce complacency. It produced questions. This site is where I work on them.

I'm building a scholarly foundation in critical organizational studies, the field that studies organizations as sites of power, meaning, and identity construction, and refuses to take organizational common sense at face value. My work sits at the intersection of that field, the rhetoric of work, and the sociology of labor. I'm particularly interested in how organizational language constructs moral categories like high performer that recruit workers into identities serving the organization's objectives rather than their own.

I use the term sustained ambition to describe the alternative: ambition that is fully considered, grounded in genuine interest, and balanced as an expression of who you are rather than a performance of who the system needs you to be. Not less ambitious. Differently ambitious. Durable rather than extractive.

There is no golden age of human-centered work to recover. Work was never designed around humans first. But that is an argument for building something that hasn't existed yet — not for accepting or decorating what we have. This site is part of that project.

Working Notions is where I think out loud about the language and systems that organize working life — what they make visible, what they quietly push out of frame, and what becomes possible when we examine them clearly.

If these questions are yours too, you're in the right place.