My Teachers
Standing on the shoulders of giants
No one builds anything alone. I'm drawn to intelligent performance and creative engineers — people who combine deep craft with the ability to make others see differently. These are the thinkers, makers, and performers who shaped how I work.
Strategy & Management
Peter Drucker
The father of modern management. His insistence that the purpose of a business is to create a customer — and that management is about making people productive — runs through everything I do.
Robert Kaplan & David Norton
The Balanced Scorecard gave organizations a way to translate strategy into operational terms. Their work on strategy maps and alignment remains foundational to EPM.
Howard Dresner
The man who coined "Business Intelligence." Howard's thinking on performance management culture and his research on what actually drives organizational performance have been a constant reference point.
Simon Tucker
Three decades in SaaS, product strategy, and customer success — Simon taught me that the real work starts after the sale. His instinct for what customers actually need (vs. what they say they want) and his ability to build organizations that deliver on that difference have shaped how I think about value, product, and growth.
Rick Cadman
Co-founder of Stratuum, former GE Digital leader, and the person I've spent more hours at the whiteboard with than anyone. Rick and I built a framework for aligning strategy to outcomes and proving out value — and in the process, he taught me that transformation isn't a deliverable, it's a discipline.
Dawna MacLean
Software engineer turned transformation leader and executive coach. Dawna has an extraordinary ability to see the human system inside the business system — to find the limiting belief behind the stalled initiative and unlock it. She taught me that the best strategy work is really leadership work.
Tony Mayo
Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School and one of the finest leadership educators I've encountered. His work on organizational behavior, executive coaching, and what makes leaders effective in context — not in theory — has deeply influenced how I design workshops and think about developing people.
Werner Erhard
The architect of transformational education. His distinction between knowing something and being transformed by it — and his relentless focus on integrity as a condition for performance — changed the way I think about leadership and accountability.
Thinking & Seeing
Edward de Bono
The pioneer of lateral thinking. His insistence that thinking is a skill — one that can be deliberately practiced and improved — is at the heart of how I design workshops and approach problem-solving.
Richard Feynman
The ultimate creative engineer. His gift wasn't just physics — it was the joy of figuring things out, the refusal to accept an explanation he couldn't build from first principles, and the ability to make the complex feel inevitable.
Edward Tufte
The master of information design. His principles on visual thinking and the integrity of data presentation shaped how I approach reporting, dashboards, and communicating complex ideas.
Performance & Voice
Gord Downie
Poet, performer, conscience. He showed what it looks like to pour everything into your craft and then use that platform to say something that matters. The rarest combination of artistic intensity and moral courage.
Stephen Fry
Polymath, raconteur, and proof that deep intelligence and warmth aren't opposites. His ability to move between literature, technology, comedy, and serious discourse — always with precision and generosity — is a model for intellectual life.
Stephen Colbert
Improv-trained, deeply read, fearlessly quick. His ability to hold a complex idea, find the absurdity in it, and make an audience think while laughing — that's intelligent performance at its best.
Derren Brown
Mentalist, psychologist, showman. His work is a masterclass in how stories, suggestion, and framing shape what people believe and decide — the same forces at play in every boardroom and sales conversation.
Ben Zander
Conductor of the Boston Philharmonic and a transformational teacher. His concept of "giving an A" and his ability to unlock possibility in a room full of strangers is the gold standard for what a workshop leader can be.
Viola Spolin
The mother of improvisational theater. Her theater games proved that creativity isn't a talent — it's a practice. "Yes, and" isn't just an improv rule; it's the foundation of every good collaboration.
Angela Buchdahl
A voice that fills the room with both rigor and compassion. Her sermons are a model of how to take ancient ideas and make them urgently relevant — the same challenge facing anyone who teaches or leads.
Howard Lyons
A Toronto legend in the world of close-up magic and a scholar of deception as craft. His precision, his love of the art form, and his insistence on getting every detail right taught me what it means to truly respect an audience.
Art & Composition
Mark Rothko
He stripped painting down to color, scale, and emotion — and proved that simplicity isn't simple. Standing in front of a Rothko is a reminder that the most powerful communication often has no words at all.
Philip Glass
Repetition, pattern, and slow transformation. His compositions are architecture in sound — structure that reveals itself over time. A reminder that constraint and discipline are the engines of creative power.
Ansel Adams
Technical mastery in service of vision. His zone system proved that great photography isn't just seeing — it's engineering the image from capture to print. Every time I pick up a camera, I'm thinking about light the way he taught us to.
The Teams I've Worked With
The best teachers are the people you build with. Colleagues at Hyperion, Anaplan, Deloitte, and dozens of client organizations who challenged my thinking, pushed back on bad ideas, and taught me what actually works in practice.