About me
I did not begin my professional life as an executive coach.
My earlier career was spent in business and operational leadership, first in France and later in Canada, where I led the Canadian operations of Mercuri International.
Those years taught me a great deal about organizations, responsibility, and people. They also exposed me to a familiar contradiction: we can become very skilled at managing complexity around us while remaining surprisingly unaware of some of the forces operating within us.
I was not exempt from that contradiction.
Over time, my professional interests shifted. I became less concerned with finding better answers to every leadership problem and increasingly curious about the person asking the questions.
What makes a capable leader defensive when faced with useful feedback? Why do intelligent people repeat patterns they can describe perfectly well? How does the exercise of authority change our relationships, and sometimes our relationship with ourselves?
These questions eventually became central to my work as an executive coach.
Today, I work individually with senior executives on leadership effectiveness and personal development. I bring my experience of organizational life, professional coaching, and a continuing interest in the less visible dimensions of how people lead.
I value a good question, especially one that interrupts an explanation we have grown too comfortable with. I believe in careful listening, but also in the usefulness of saying something difficult when the relationship can hold it.
There is another part of my life that matters to me: writing.
In The Slow-Fast Paradox, I examine a question that has occupied me for years: why does experience so often fail to become learning? In Cardboard Wings, I write more personally about family, ambition, loss, and those unexpected moments when life asks us to reconsider who we have become.
I have spent much of my life trying to understand leadership. These days, I am just as interested in understanding what helps us remain learners.
And I suspect that inquiry will continue for some time.
