Hard skills

---

First and foremost, you  must understand what motivates and/or drives a customer or client.  I have vast experience in unwinding complex buisness processes, simplifying them down to digestible workflows and processes and documenting them with a combination of word, pictures and process flow maps.

My career has revolved around selling and delivering solutions.  While those solutions were usually wrapped around a product, convincing customers and clients (there's a difference) to adopt my products services and solutions as the standard is what gets me excited.

 As former PMP (PMBOK 2000), I am a selling project manager.  Early in my career I was engaged in business development efforts for professional services and hardware implementations.  I adopted the PMBOK as a means to ensure that what we sold, was also delivered and thus paid for. 

As a serial entrepreneur, one of the most enjoyable parts of my work is analyzing trends, user behavior and general market activity.  By collecting this information, businesses can plan its market approach to commercialization, establishing a beachhead in the desired market and expand as desired from a position of strength.

I am a student of and disciple of Geoffrey Moore's book Crossing the Chasm.  This is the cornerstone of my approach to product management.  Mapping features to buyer profiles and uncovering the real drivers behind a complete solution are fundamental approaches that I utilize every day.

Why do people buy things?  Why do they choose the things that they buy?  What do people consider valuable?  At the end of the day, an analysis of commercialization is an analysis of the people to whom you are marketing and targeting your product.  I find the study of people and process fascinating.

In my opinion, leadership is about providing daily examples of the doing the right thing.  Leadership requires trust in your team.  Leadership requires vulnerability and confidence.  All these things must be exhibited by the figureheads of the organization in order for that organization to be healthy and vibrant allowing it to gain its own capacity to thrive.

In my experience, vision is about understanding current trends and applying historical precedent to model future behavior.  This strategy has served me very well throughout my career in guiding organizations towards commercialization strategies that target the current environment, with growth in the direction of the "to be" environment.

Shark Tank cracks me up.  "My product is disrupting the $1.3B toothpaste market by ..."  In my experience, disruption is a knife fight ... and  getting a grant while you attend Stanford to commercialize your PHD thesis aside, if you are a business and you want to take market share away from the prevailing forces, you are going to have to fight for it ... usually up close and personal.

People buy things from people they like.  People buy products they want ... that make them feel good.  I have always had a knack for making people laugh.  If I can make someone laugh, then I can communicate with them on an open and personal level.  I use humor as a tool to disarm people's biases and break down their walls to facilitate real, honest, open communication.

Building on the "Humorous but Serious" approach, I utilize hyperbole, metaphors/similes and story telling to make very complex technological items simple and understandable.  No one will "buy on faith".  No one will adopt a plan or execute against a project they don't understand.  Story telling is a mechanism to craft a pitch to convince people to work in the direction you want them to.

Unfettered creative is beautiful (sometimes) but not usually useful in the confines of business.  In my experience working with some of the brightest minds in technology, the concept of the artist engineer is pervasive.  These are highly creative minds, with an engineers mentality of structure and process.  Harnessing this creativity in a directed way requires Leadership and Vision, and being Humorous while being Serious and often requires telling stories in order to relate to the team within which you work in order to accomplish the goals and objectives at hand.