As a founding collaborator in Innovation Ecosystem (previously Practical Clarity), I work with expert level 'ecosystem innovators' to deliver impactful new ideas that address complex challenges in a fast changing world. We come to this work as practical hands-on innovators who have spent decades enabling creative thinkers from all over the world to change their organisations and industries. These varied initiatives repeatedly demonstrate a fundamental truth about innovation. Whether you are trying to disrupt an industry, developing a creative new idea, or tackling a wicked problem like climate change, innovations need to deal with real-world complexity and messiness.We believe that ecosystem innovation can be a reliable and repeatable approach for this work, and have spent the last two decades developing practices that expand the practical system innovation creative toolkit. This work allows organizations to tackle harder problems with original solutions that are big enough to matter. We work with clients across commercial, public sector, and non profit industries to:• Design high impact innovations that address big opportunities and disruptive challenges• Scale and implement complex innovations that are blocked or failing to realize impact• Build agile adaptive enterprises capable of delivering ambitious new ideas• Develop the next generation innovation skills needed to be a 'system choreographer' We actively work to develop and share thought leadership on the theory and hands-on practice of ecosystem innovation. See our upcoming book - Do Bigger Things, a practical guide to powerful innovation in a changing world, as well as our podcasts, papers, and workshop presentations.

ThoughtWorks established its global presence (40+ offices) by being an early pioneer of agile software development. For a decade this thought leadership drove rapid growth, but by 2010, despite excellent technical skills, agile development was rapidly becoming a commoditized offering. As the Global Innovation Lead, my role was to envision, design, and deploy new practice offerings that would extend Agile into complex business + technology initiatives. This next generation of agile services was designed to move out of the CIO’s office and engage emerging digital strategy officers, disruptive business change leaders, and senior business executives. The resulting interconnected portfolio of service lines addressed challenges across the entire systems innovation lifecycle. Initiatives included: SYSTEMS INNOVATION STRATEGY - Reimagined the approach to strategy development focusing on business + technology systems level innovationsSTRATEGIC PRODUCT MANAGEMENT - Originated the strategic product management role within TW, focusing on long term big picture value AGILE UX - Helped integrate Agile UX and cross functional teams into complex enterprise initiativesFLEXIBLE TECHNOLOGY ARCHITECTURE – Collaborated with senior technologists on strategies to enable nimble legacy migration, collaborative data models, and flexible system architectures AGILE ENTERPRISE TRANSFORMATION – Led the creation and formalization of practices for agile enterprise transformation (tools featured in Jim Highsmith’s recent book “The Edge”)This focus on “ambitious problems” provided numerous opportunities for hands on engagement with the strategic challenges of global clients. Organizations ranged from disruptive market entrants to industry leading incumbents, working across commercial, public, and non-profit sectors. * Education * Energy * Retail * Agriculture * Medicine * Government * Media / Entertainment * Finance * Humanitarian Aid

Enterprise Product Manager responsible for re-imagining an automotive OEM’s digital strategy for delivering $800 million per month of personalized financial sales incentives. This broad cross organization initiative linked business activities across sales, audit, customer finance, customer support, cross channel online marketing, and dealer operations. As the principal solution architect for this initiative, provided full life cycle leadership for this multi-year initiative. • Strategic Visioning and Evangelism: Created the compelling “big picture” strategy for the initiative, partnering with innovation evangelists from within GM. Supported this narrative with comprehensive planning artifacts, that included end to end modeling of the complex multi-functional domain.• Innovative Technical Solution: Addressed the previously unsolved challenges associated with real time evaluation of thousands of personalization rules for each publishing request. Traditional rules engines were overwhelmed. Working with GM’s PhD mathematicians, pioneered an original analytical model that leveraged set theory and logical grammars to deliver highly scalable and reliable performance. Collaborated with technical vendors on the definition of a supporting state of the art e-business framework and service oriented architecture (SOA). • Complex Business Adoption: Directed the business and technical deployment of the system to 7,200 independent dealerships as well as coordinating adoption by GM’s internal business support services. Collaborated with a range of vendors and third party online services to enable real time integration with their rapidly evolving properties.

This transformation program was initiated as part of a strategic system re-platforming at the state agency responsible for managing hundreds of thousands of teacher and state employee pensions. The agency’s technical support organization had a long history of traditional highly structured practices. As the leader of this initiative, I was responsible for the ground-up reimagining of a far more responsive technology – business relationship. The transformation was conducted while technology teams were still responsible for providing support on hundreds of requests. This ‘built while in flight’ effort pioneered a number of interconnected strategies that are widely adopted today in agile enterprises. •. Dynamically Prioritized Pipelines: A predecessor of Kanban style card walls, this was a major shift in practice and culture for a tradition bound IT operation. Teams were positioned to respond flexibly to shifting user needs instead of committing to fixed project planning. • Outcome Based Measures: Technical team KPI’s were increasingly based on the business value created, not just technical tasks performed. •. Automated Build Pipelines: Automation of functional testing and configuration management enabled faster and more reliable build pipelines. •. Integrated Formal Governance: The flexible new team practices were merged with the State’s ongoing requirements for formal technology governance, such as COBIT reviews.

At a time of deep turmoil, took over the Client Partner role for Volkswagen and Audi US, a flagship account for the international digital IT consultancy, Silverline. The dot com crash was underway, the client had placed the account "in review", senior executives had exited, and the client's technology group was highly critical of deployment quality. Strategic partnering enabled a turnaround of the engagements, shifting the focus from selling "projects" to building on an integrated enterprise digital strategy. This Within 18 months, the globally distributed 40 person team had delivered multiple pioneering digital initiatives. Delivery quality and timeliness also improved, placing among the teams among the top ranked vendors for this automotive OEM. These initiatives were undertaken at a crucial time in the emerging online sector, when a rapidly growing demand for personalized e-business services were pushing innovators toward more sophisticated systems initiatives. Program achievements included: • B2B Cross Enterprise Integration: Led the strategic design and oversaw the rapid implementation of the OEM’s first fully integrated online sales channel. The resulting consumer-to-dealer sales channel was the “highest ranked” online leads generation program among vehicle manufactures operating in the U.S. (JD Power 2001, based on Dealer satisfaction). • B2C Targeted Marketing / 360 View: Organized and facilitated a multi-vendor strategy to create personalized services for buyers and owners. Leveraged new content management technology, enabled integrated feed back loops via web analytics, and moved toward a single 360 degree customer view that unified online data sources and linked to legacy business applications.

This senior product management role highlighted the range of systems innovation challenges that can result from ambitious business strategies. A well funded merger and acquisition firm was seeking to integrate numerous independent automotive transport businesses into a single enterprise, optimizing their combined operation through a new proprietary scheduling system. This flashy IP driven technology investment was only half of the strategic challenge. Substantial business and technology challenges stood in the way of integrating the backroom systems of firms that were being acquired at a pace of nearly one per week. Worked directly with the client CIO to rapidly design and implement a nationwide strategy to address this challenge, migrating data and integrating the proprietary systems of diverse local acquisitions into a centralized ERP. This flexible integration strategy enabled the pace of acquisitions necessary to achieve critical mass in the eyes of Wall Street investors.

Founding principal and CTO of a technology enabled startup that empowered government agencies at the federal, state and local government level to participate in newly deregulated natural gas markets. In a field that had significant risks of impropriety (e.g. Enron), IQ Solutions provided transparent participation in discounted markets that were otherwise open only to large industrial scale buyers. Over a period of 10 years, successfully managed the business growth cycle from start-up through market expansion and eventual sale. In a highly competitive market, posted sustained growth of 40% per year and achieved Inc. 500 recognition. This unique business offering was made possible by the technical integration of many individual public sector locations. When this technology was combined with supporting business services, 10,000 California schools or a hundred state facilities could act like a large aggregate buyer. The resulting energy market access delivered millions of dollars in annual savings to taxpayers. Clients included government organizations such as the States of California, Michigan, Ohio, New York, and New Jersey, as well the Department of Defense, California and Michigan public schools, and the City of Chicago.