Meet the Author: The Personal Story

Professional Journey

In college, I started out as a biology major but gave it up due to his discomfort of killing animals in order to study them. I switched majors and earned a degree in Philosophy and a minor in Humanities. Along the way I picked up more hours in music than anything else, learning to play and perform on all the most common instruments in bands and orchestras. To this day, I continue my auto-didactic journey playing and performing classical guitar.

After college, I was a community organizer in Cleveland working with VISTA. My wife, Meg, an I then moved to the Chicago area where I earned a Masters Degree in Educational Leadership and Psychology. I worked as a teacher for 7 years, facilitating learning of students from 3rd grade through graduate school in subject matter including science, social studies, math, phiosophy, psychology, and physical education. I also helped students earn GEDs or get advanced credit through the College Level Examination Program (CLEP). Unfortunately, this was during a time of declining enrollment and I was RIFfed multiple times and unable to earn tenure in any of the 3 districts where I taught.

Next I went on to write textbooks and authored chapters in 48 books in science, health, social studies, and math. I taught himself - then others - how to use a personal computer and wrote programs to measure readability. I saw the potential of using computers in education so went to another company where I developed training materials for professionals starting to use relational databases. I and my team were very involved in the beginnings of computer-based training and early experiments using CDs to help deliver multimedia training. I was promoted to Director of Product Development in a department of over 120 professionals. Then that company was bought and I moved on.

My next career was as Director of Organization Development in a large, global software company. My team developed and delivered sales training, management training, leadership development, and numerous programs to improve process and product quality. I became a sought after advisor and coach to many executives in the firm. I moved on when the company was purchased.

Meg and I started our own consulting and coaching practice in 1991. I worked with companies in the Fortune 1000, mom-and-pop starups, and everything in between. My work spanned multiple industries and geographies. In 2000, I added to my portfolio becoming a chair over time of 5 groups of CEOs, each of which I started from scratch. I facilitated members working as peer groups to help each other improve their business results and quality of life. For about 20 years, I worked with members from hundreds of companies and did one-to-one coaching with an average of 50 CEOs and executives a month. I continued his private practice doing much of the same, including strategic planning, systems thinking, and team building.

In "retirement", I continue to do a bit of coaching, stratgic planning and team building. A great deal of my "work" time is as a volunteer with a number of non-profit organizations in my community.

Writing

I started writing stories and poetry when I was about 8 years old - primarily as a hobby - as a way to capture my creativity and thinking. There was no thought about taking my work public.

At age 17, I started keeping a journal of my philosophical thinking, mostly ponderings about the meaning of life and the possible existence of god. I decided to collect 50+ years of those ponderings - essays, poetry, music, lay-led services, and pithy sayings - to pass along to my children. I published these thoughts in What Was I Thinking?. See more below.

As I was moving toward retirement and wanting to do less standup training, I wrote a book to capture the management model I'd evolved over years of my work in that area. that book - What Does It Mean to be a Manager?: Five Phases of Employee Development and 18 Tasks of Management is below. A few companies purchased multiple copies to use as lunch-and-learn materials. I was asked to develop a discussion guide to assist them, so that's also shown here.

One day in about 1978, I wrote and illustrated a children's book - Dog's Tale. I was always a punster (ask my kids) and had a fun time writing a quick story loaded with word and picture puns. I showed it to a graphic artist to whom I was also teaching guitar. She offered to illustrate the book more professionally. I wasn't particularly fond of her art work and was busy with other things. So the book got filed away. After my self-publishing experiences with the management books, I figured I might as well try to self publish this one as well. So 25 years after it had been shelved, I hired another graphic artist who specializes in chiildren's books, and producedd what you see here.

Since my first introduction to Kurt Vonnegut when I was in college, I was enamored with his concepts and writing style. Beginning in about 1978, I started to imagine a story about a computer professional, a bag lady and pigeons. I thought about writing a letter to Vonnegut telling him I was writing his next book. I never wrote the letter, but for the last 47 years, I've jotted notes and bits of a story. After a devestating computer crash with no digital backup, I took it as a sign to give it up. However, the story - at least in my head - kept evolving as a place to park my ideas. In December 2024, during a wonderful lunch reminiscing with a long-lost colleague, she challenged me to re-engage with the story and see what might come about. In March 2025, I finished the first draft of the full story, amazed at how the characters directed the story line. The Lost Message is the culmination of that work.