I spent twenty-five years inside two of the largest banks in the world — and I climbed the whole way, from executive assistant to Managing Director and Global Head of Risk and Controls. I know what the room actually weighs, because I sat in every seat of it.
I began my career as an executive assistant. I finished it as a Managing Director and Global Head of Risk and Controls for one of the largest businesses in global finance — eighteen years at one institution, then the top risk-and-controls seat at another. Between those two points is a climb through nearly every seat in the room, and a compensation arc that multiplied many times over.
That path is rare, and it's the reason I see careers and leadership the way I do. I've been the person nobody was watching, and the person in the room deciding who rises. I know what actually gets weighed — and how little of it is what people think.
My career at the center of institutional risk taught me one thing above all: the costliest risk in most organizations is rarely the model or the market. It's how people are led — and almost no one is measuring it. That conviction is the through-line of everything I do now.
I help organizations see leadership behavior as the operational risk it is — and I help individual leaders read the room and break through. Advisory →
Author of the novel Leadership at the Dinner Table, host of the Totally Unacceptable podcast, writer of The FireStarter, and a keynote speaker featured at XLoD Global. Speaking →
I'm a father of five. I was born and raised in Brooklyn and I'm raising my own family in New Jersey. I just turned fifty, and I spend a lot of my thinking time on long walks with a book in my ears — when I'm not on a Spartan course with two friends chasing another Trifecta.
I write and advise about leadership coming home because I live it. The whole thesis of my novel — that what happens to you at work walks through your front door and teaches your kids what believing in yourself looks like — isn't a concept to me. It's the reason any of this matters.
Whether it's advisory, a keynote, or the book — if any of this landed, I'd like to hear from you.
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