October 7, 2026 My Dad worked for 30+ years for a company that grew from an entrepreneur selling products out of the trunk of his used car to a multinational, with offices in Japan, Canada, and Holland, with sub-assembly vendors all over the world. Salesmen criss-crossed the country both by car and their own private…
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September 7, 2026 Long tenure in IT leadership means you accumulate stories. Some are victory laps; most are technological horror stories. The ones that stick with you aren’t the dramatic zero-day ransomware attacks—they’re the quiet, grinding tragedies of institutional amnesia. Some years ago, I walked into an IT environment that had been stewarded by a…
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August 24, 2026 Since my earliest days in IT, I’ve always described myself as “platform agnostic”—never religiously tied to one operating system, but choosing to master them all and recognizing that no single tool fits every job. Back in my college days as a Business major, it was IBM PCs all the way. Big, hulking…
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June 17, 2026 When I first began researching my Cherokee ancestry, I started where many people do: Ancestry.com. It’s a tempting place to begin — you can plug in fragments, and suddenly branches appear, often because someone else has already walked that path and left their notes behind. Some of the trees are beautiful, stretching…
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June 3, 2026 I was talking with a friend recently, and the topic came up that a mutual CIO colleague had recently tendered his resignation. It’s for all the reasons you’d suspect, and many I’ve talked about before. Probably too often. The old joke about the title CIO meaning “Career Is Over” ain’t far removed,…
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May 19, 2026 Busy weekend! We said goodbye to a visiting friend from Oklahoma on Friday, and by Sunday we were at the Detroit Masonic Temple for “Candlelight: 90s Hip-Hop on Strings,” which was wonderfully fun and intimate in the smaller auditorium. The musicians were the Kalkaska String Quartet, based here in Michigan. Joe Jackson…
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May 5, 2026 Last week I had an observation related to music and organizational leadership. I love it when my diverse interests come together! As I’m fond of pointing out how creative solutions come from diverse thinking, I was recently listening to Billy Corgan’s podcast “The Magnificent Others,” where his guest was guitarist Jeff “Skunk”…
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April 10,2026 The Internet can be the “back catalog” of our history. Let me explain. One of the cool things about our Internet-connected world is that it can change our perceptions and beliefs about the world around us. Not in a government-controlled, PR-massaged kind of way — that happens too much already — but in…
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“One of the biggest roles of science fiction is to prepare people to accept the future without pain and to encourage a flexibility of the mind. Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.” – Arthur C. Clarke Translation: Greetings from the Land of the Anishinaabe, who are comprised of the Ojibwe (Chippewa), Odawa (Ottawa),…
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February 23, 2026 Winter in Michigan has a way of celebrating itself, especially when the Olympics are on and every other athlete seems to have trained within an hour of your house. But it wasn’t the medal count that stopped me in my tracks—it was a Starbucks ad. One musical choice, and suddenly I wasn’t…
