I write to figure things out.
You're welcome to read along.
Every week — sometimes twice a week — I publish here and on Substack. I draw an illustrative sketch to go with each piece. Two series have emerged, each pulling at a different thread of the same life.
Becoming
These are personal essays about growing up as a fostered, then adopted child — and about what that does to a person over the course of a life and career. The passivity you develop to survive. The shame that shows up uninvited in elevators and conference rooms decades later. The moment you finally recognize the bully pattern, in a boss, in a father, in yourself.
The most-read piece opens with a meat cleaver. My wife, coming down the hall. Me, curled under the covers at thirty years old, having just been fired and not yet told her. It's not a comfortable essay. But by the end, it explains — more directly than anything else I've written — why I understand what happens to people when they're made to feel small at work, and why that understanding is the foundation of everything I do professionally.
These essays aren't separate from my advisory work. They are the source of it.
Read on the blog →Advisory Notes
These are essays about the emotional realities of creative professional life — the anxiety of leadership, the psychology of negotiation, the particular ways creative people get in their own way, and the particular ways organizations let them down.
One of the most-read pieces, "Why Creative Firms Break Differently," argues that creative firms don't fail from bad strategy — they unravel from the inside, through fatigue, misalignment, and a gradual loss of trust no one can quite name. That piece captures what all of these essays are reaching toward.
I write from four decades of experience inside creative firms, but I write the way I talk: directly, without jargon, with stories. Each piece includes one of my own illustrations. If you work in a creative firm and ever feel like the game is rigged against you, this series is for you.
Read on the blog →The personal and the professional
turned out to be the same thing.
I didn't start writing until relatively late in life, and when I did, I started with the personal — trying to understand my own adoption story, my own passivity, my own pattern of going quiet when I should have spoken up. What I found, slowly, was that the writing was doing something the decades of professional experience hadn't: it was showing me why I work the way I work.
The shame response I write about in Becoming — the freeze in the elevator lobby, the little ball I curled into — that's the same response I see in creative professionals who go silent in client meetings, who don't fight for their fees, who let bad briefs pass without pushback. It's not weakness. It's an adaptive strategy from an earlier chapter of life that's outlived its usefulness.
Once I understood that in myself, I could recognize it in others. And once I could recognize it, I could help with it. The writing didn't just explain me to myself. It became the foundation of my practice.
So the two series aren't as different as they look. Becoming traces the personal roots. Advisory Notes traces how those roots show up in organizations. They're chapters of the same story.
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Also available on Substack.
You never cease to amaze me with your willingness to make your life an open book — especially the more hurtful parts. And I'm amazed by the lessons you draw from all of it.
— Larry Coffman, PublisherYour writing has revealed some very intimate, powerful lessons. You are a source of inspiration both professionally and, increasingly, on a personal level.
— Rick GoreWe can discuss the ugly, uncomfortable truths while always circling back to what matters: the people, the underdogs, the work we get to do, and the magical existence we get to share as creatives.
— Sarah EskandarpourI loved your article about how clients' emotions affect briefs. It's a huge part of the creative industry and it's always good to see somebody so knowledgeable write about it.
— Vuk Bojovic, JKR Account Director, Singapore