Every organization I've worked in taught me the same lesson from a different angle: the work of leadership is almost never what it looks like from the outside. The headline moves aren't what matter. The small, steady decisions are.
My path to that lesson wasn't linear.
After high school, I pursued a dream of U.S. intelligence work. I studied abroad in Switzerland, France, and China and learned multiple languages. When I heard that a law degree would strengthen an intelligence career, I set out to earn one. Along the way, I listened to the Oklahoma County Public Defender speak at a local event. Something in the way he described the work pulled me toward it. I applied for a position in his office and was accepted.
Public defense is where I learned that most of what matters in a case happens before you ever walk into a courtroom. Preparation, listening, the small decisions about what to press and what to let go — those were the real work. As an Assistant Public Defender, I took every case seriously and built high-volume client management systems under intense pressure. Systems were how I survived the caseload. They became a way of thinking.
My career also included three boutique law firms — practiced at different points, before and between corporate roles — small enough that every operational seam was visible. You couldn't hide behind a department. If the intake process was broken, you felt it on Monday morning. If the owner hadn't decided what the firm actually did, you felt it in every client meeting. I paid attention to those seams.
I also spent twelve years in Fortune 500 oil and gas corporate land departments, in leadership roles across multiple organizations. Large companies are a different animal — more structure, more abstraction, more distance between a decision and its consequences. But the underlying patterns were the same. Teams fell apart for the same reasons. Good people got stuck for the same reasons. And the firm or department's dependence on any one leader was never actually about that leader's effort. It was about the infrastructure that had never been built.
The pattern wasn't about effort. It was about infrastructure that had never been built.
What I do now
I channel that expertise into helping boutique law firm owners build confident teams that can run without them. Through Long Term Leadership, I work with firm owners on the specific problems I've spent a career watching: delegation that never quite lands, accountability structures that don't hold, authority that gets routed around, the firm that can't function for a week without its founder in the room.
I'm a Birkman Method® consultant, trained in systematic legal analysis and corporate leadership structures. I'm the author of The Subtle Art of Leadership, which distills the frameworks I use with clients into a book you can read on a plane. And I publish weekly on LinkedIn — short essays on leadership patterns, and a founder spotlight series featuring the people doing the work.
How I work
Together we install leadership infrastructure that stays in place whether you're in the office or on vacation.
A few of my favorites
- Hike The Amalfi Coast
- Book The Count of Monte Cristo
- Quote "Well begun is half done." — Aristotle