Author & Leadership Coach

My story is a convoluted one and I hope you enjoy reading it.

I began my college career back in 1990 at Eastern Washington University in Cheney, WA. I was going to create a degree designed around music video editing which, at that time, was really not going to go anywhere even with the popularity of MTV. 

As it turned out I ended up getting a bachelor’s degree in Cultural Anthropology. At the end of that program I spent a year in Israel studying Israel and its history and I fell in love with the nation and the people. From that I developed a passion for Israeli archeology, coming back from Israel, I went on to study Syro-Palestinian Archeology at University of Arizona in Tucson, AZ. A degree that really focused on Israel during the Biblical period. 

After completing that program and getting a Master’s degree and at the same time finding out that there really wasn’t a lot of a future in America for someone with that kind of a degree. From there I moved into the information technology field starting out supporting the product known as Windows 95. 

This was the beginning of a 30-plus year career in information technology where I’ve held positions as far up as director of information technology and everything in between. While I was working in that field a friend encouraged me to join his team at Gonzaga University to get a PhD in organizational leadership. 

As I began that process, I decided to do something within my field, and choose a degree on leadership in the field of cyber-ethics specifically in Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games read World of Warcraft. 

About 3 years into that I was studying at a Starbucks in Spokane, WA. I recall reading one of the quotes by Dr. Cornel West of Princeton.  “To lead the people you must first love the people and to save the people you must first the serve the people.” 

That quote resonated with me to the point that it became an epiphany for me and I changed my entire doctoral focus after three years of effort, I threw away all of my work up to that point and started over, so it took me a while to get my doctorate but I did finish and I produced a PhD dissertation titled Leadership Amore: Love as the Art and Science of Leadership, which has now become a book titled “Head for Leading / Heart for Loving: Leveraging Compassion, Influence and Relationships to Achieve your Organizational Goals. 

My passion is teaching leadership because leaders are not born, they are educated, they are made, they’re created by who they follow and listen to, and by their desire to lead and move society forward. 

Today new leaders need, more than anything, to be taught the right kind of leadership so that they can change the face of America and the world. I am certain we need new leaders in the area of government, politics, not-for-profit, and the corporate world. 

Leaders need to be better leaders and the best way to do that is to educate them in the beginning. I have a passion to convey great leadership and the principles and practices of great leadership to students.