Born to a chemical engineer father and social worker mother in the working-class town of Pittsburgh, PA, I learned the values of connecting process to outcomes and the importance of being of service to others at an early age. Being the youngest of four boys in a family of 5 children, I endured a lot of hope and pressure to succeed where others had failed in order to uplift and support my family. Moving from Pittsburgh to Charleston, WV, to Lake Charles, LA over the course of my childhood and adolescence engendered in me the ability to adapt to constant change which has been my status quo as an adult living all over the US and spending considerable time living and working in the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America.

 

As a young professional in the pharmaceutical industry, I was exposed to Gallup’s StrengthsFinder tool back in 2002 which informed my philosophy of focusing on what was right with people versus what was not. According to the StrengthsFinder assessment, I am naturally gifted with the ability to forge connections between seemingly unrelated items, influence transformation from good to great, quickly generate options, inspire confidence in others, and confront and overcome obstacles. By honing my natural talents into reliable strengths I successfully matriculated through Pfizer and ultimately found a corporate home at Schering-Plough as a fast-track management associate where I worked for one of the most successful marketing teams in the pharmaceutical industry. I became the youngest marketing director and senior marketing director in the company’s history before Schering-Plough was acquired by Merck.

 

My 8 years of experience working on this high performing team became the seed that would germinate and ultimately grow into my book Leader Board: The DNA of High Performance Teams.

 

I began leading teams in 2006 and began implementing principles I’d learned reading books by John C. Maxwell, Tom Rath, Patrick Lencioni, Stephen Covey, and Jim Collins to name a few. Over time I found significant gaps between the brilliant theories of these leadership giants and the exact application in the day-to-day minutiae of leading a team in the real world. So, I set out to synthesize and adapt these concepts into a suite of Team Performance Acceleration Principles and Servant Leadership principles that I've used with teams of different sizes and scopes all over the world to drive results.

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I firmly believe that we make our own luck by knowing our strengths, building our networks, and preparing for the opportunities ahead!