About me

• Sr. Director. Discovery & Design at AstraZeneca

• Super passionate about Problem Framing  (1, 2)

• Living in Paradise (Tampa, Florida) 

• Headphones on ~95% of the time (MS Teams or Spotify)

• Super eclectic taste in music (Sade to Yngwie, Marvin Gaye to Metallica. Not a fan of country music) 

• Live to work / highly engaged (positive, upbeat, glass half full and you can always refill it)

• I believe people are inherently good

Passionately Opinionated, Admittedly Human

I am highly engaged and spend a lot of time thinking about the work, and bring a number of years of experience to the job, so when I offer an opinion, it’s generally because I’ve thought through things pretty deeply or because I understand the situation really well. I can usually rattle off a number of pros & cons pretty quickly. That said, I’m human, and fallible, and willing to admit when I'm wrong (when the facts change…). If there is a disagreement about something, I try to carve out time to challenge my thinking and consider alternate points of view… 

Need to know

• I’m roughly ~70% introvert, and really value alone time (I need it to recharge) 

• I prefer small teams of passionate people, and am totally comfortable working alone 

• I think most meetings are a waste of time, and am deeply suspicious of any that have more than 3 to 5 attendees… and most meetings are too long. 

• Hates when people credential themselves (repeatedly), I don’t care how much you know until I know how much you care

• Hates when people complain 

• I’m totally comfortable (even thrive) with ambiguity

• I want people to regard me as smart; and I write people off too quickly that I don’t think are smart or engaged (unengaged people are my kryptonite) 

• Blind Spots are organizational politics and  assuming that everyone knows everything that I know or everything I’m thinking

Working with me

I'm an incredible optimist, and believe that most things are possible. When people say that things are hard or can't be done, I want (need) them to explain why. 

• I’m typically online and ready to meet by 6AM EST (11AM UK)

• I tend to shut down around 5PM EST (10PM UK) for a couple of hours, but will work a few nights a week

• Email or Teams, then text, then phone call. 

• I'm not good with small blocks of time. I need long blocks of uninterrupted time to be productive 

I commit to the following, and look for the same in the people I work with:

• Passionate ownership and engagement of the work I’m involved in

• Be intellectually curious, and seek to understand as much as possible

• Recognize the goal is delivery  

• Have genuine empathy for our customers and our team  

• Politics free - my only agenda is to improve the lives of patients, partners and co-workers 

• Admit I’m not always right, develop something to help us work through disagreements