About
I am a writer, speaker and operator.
For more than twenty-five years, I built things inside organisations. Now I write about what that work asked of me, and what I'm choosing to give myself to instead.
About
For more than twenty-five years, I built things inside organisations. Now I write about what that work asked of me, and what I'm choosing to give myself to instead.
I worked across technology, SaaS and iGaming, building teams, leading change, running the numbers and making decisions with real consequences. I was often the operator in the room: the person expected to see how the parts connected, notice what was missing and turn a decision into something an organisation could actually carry.
Performance was always part of my responsibility. Over time, one thing became impossible to ignore: performance is inseparable from the conditions people work inside. Clarity, trust, accountability, psychological safety, difficult conversations and consistent leadership are not the softer work around the edges. They are the work.
The same years showed me the distance that can grow between a decision and the person living with it. Leaders can care deeply and still step away at the moment their presence matters most. We can make a rational decision, leave HR to carry its emotional weight and tell ourselves the process was handled. We can ask people to invest years of their lives in what we are building without fully confronting what that asks of them.
Then I experienced that distance from the other side. A role ended, and despite everything I knew about how organisations make these decisions, I still went home wondering what it said about who I was. For a while, the end of the role seemed to have taken my identity with it. The years, the ability and the person I had become had not disappeared. I had temporarily lost sight of them behind the story shame was telling.
That experience did not replace everything I had learned as an operator. It changed the angle from which I could see it. I had delivered difficult decisions and had one delivered to me. I had seen how leadership decisions travel through organisations, and I now understood more intimately what people may carry home when the meeting is over.
Today I turn those years into talks, essays and conversations about leadership and the lives affected by it. My flagship keynote, The People Part Is Leadership: Confessions of an Operator, examines what leaders leave with HR when the people part becomes uncomfortable. My more personal writing, The Agency Letters, explores identity, shame, agency and the meaning we make from what happens to us.
I am also one of the founding voices behind The Lady's Realm, a community and journal for women living through transition. I wrote one of its first letters under the pen name Annie. Some things need to be written before we are ready to place our name beside them.
I am still an operator in how I think. I look for what connects, what is missing and what a decision is actually going to ask of the people living inside it. I am more deliberate now about where I aim that instinct: less interested in climbing back into a structure I have outgrown, more interested in the work I choose and why.