I didn't set out to be a futurist... or an optimist.
Before I ever worked with executives or spoke on big stages, I was a musician.
I spent years learning to read a room, notice when something felt off, and understand why a group of talented people could technically be playing all the right notes… and still sound wrong.
I didn’t have language for it then, but I was already learning to look up — to see the larger thing shaping what was happening right in front of me.
When I moved into organizations, I was struck by how familiar the challenges felt.
Talented people.
Big ambitions.
Lots of moving parts.
And yet, good people kept getting stuck in the same problems: burnout, resistance, bottlenecks, failed change.
At first, I did what most of us do — I looked at the people. What makes work meaningful? Why do some people thrive while others burn out? How do we help people change? Then I looked at leaders. Then teams. Then organizations.
And every time I thought I’d found the problem, I discovered a bigger system around it.
Over the past twenty years, I’ve worked with leaders inside organizations employing more than one million people, from Microsoft, CHANEL, Amazon, Sony, and Genentech to healthcare systems, nonprofits, startups, and government.
I’ve been a consultant, advisor, founder, CEO, and speaker. I’ve seen organizations from a lot of angles. Eventually, I decided to build the kind of company I thought should exist.
I spent the better part of a decade building a technology company around a radically different way of working: autonomy, trust, transparency, and human energy.
And a lot of it worked. The product worked. The way we worked worked. But the company failed.
That failure forced me to confront a much bigger question:
What if the problems inside organizations are being shaped by systems larger than the organizations themselves?
So I looked up again.
That's where the optimism comes in.
Not the sunny, “everything-will-always-work-out” kind of optimism.
The chosen kind.
I’ve seen enough broken systems to know denial doesn’t help. But I’ve also seen enough moments of real transformation to know despair is lazy.
When people can see more of what’s actually happening — when they can see the systems instead of just the symptoms — fear starts to lose its grip.
What we see changes what we can do.
When leaders finally make sense of what actually needs to change — when the noise quiets just enough — people don’t resist the future.
They rise to it.
Fear thrives in confusion. But agency grows in clarity.
I’m not a born optimist. For me, optimism isn’t a personality trait, it’s a decision. It’s an act of rebellion, a refusal to outsource our collective future to hype, fear, or inevitability.
Because the future isn't fate.
It's what we dare to make.
Eventually, I realized I'd been doing the same thing my whole career.
Every time I found a problem, I looked at what surrounded it.
People → leaders → teams → organizations → economics → technology → the future of work.
I kept looking up until I arrived at the biggest system I could find: the economy itself.
My new book, Work Will Kill Us All: An Optimist’s Guide to the Future, asks what happens when we apply the same systems lens to work, A.I., inequality, climate, and the economy we’ve built around them.
The title is intentionally alarming.
The book isn’t.
It’s ultimately about a much bigger possibility: building an economy that helps life flourish.
Because once we see the system, we can start imagining a different one.
When I step on stage, my goal is simple: give people a new place to look: UP.
I don’t pretend I can solve every problem in an organization from a stage. But I can help a room full of people see something they couldn’t see before.
A system behind a symptom. An assumption they hadn’t questioned. A possibility hidden inside disruption. A better question about what comes next.
Because a new perspective changes what’s possible.