You've been in this meeting. Six people around a table, or six squares on a screen, and one person is missing. The whole thing stalls. Nobody wants to make the call because the person who normally makes the call isn't there. So everyone agrees to pick it up next [...]
People hear "helicopter skills" and think of helicopter parenting. Hovering. Checking in on everything. Never letting the kid, or in this case the team, out of your sight. That's not what I mean by it. Not even close. When I use the phrase with a client, I'm not talking [...]
A press release takes an afternoon to write. New raise, new pipeline milestone, new name on the leadership page. It's designed to get people excited, and it works. But a headline announcing money coming in tells you almost nothing about whether the company cashing that check is a stable [...]
I've told candidates to walk away from offers they were excited about. Good title, good money, good company on paper. And I've had to look them in the eye, or at least on a screen, and say something that sounds insane coming from the person who gets paid when [...]
I've spent close to thirty years placing technology leaders. A good chunk of that has been in Biotech and Pharma. And the one thing I keep coming back to, across every kind of organization I work with, is curiosity. The people who ask the most questions consistently do the [...]
A resume tells you where someone has been. It tells you what titles they've held, what companies they've worked for, what platforms they claim to know. In Biotech and Pharma IT, I see resumes every day that look exactly right. The experience is there. The tenure is there. The [...]
Most organizations already have smart people. Capable engineers, infrastructure leaders, security professionals, architects, and data teams who know their environments extremely well. In many cases, the technical side of the organization is functioning exactly the way it's supposed to. And yet companies still struggle. Projects slow down. Leadership becomes [...]
I've spent nearly three decades talking to technology leaders. CIOs. CTOs. Infrastructure heads. Security executives. Data leaders. Architects. Engineers who became managers. Managers who became executives. After enough years in this business, you start to notice patterns that show up over and over again, regardless of company size, industry, [...]
I was in the middle of a conversation recently when something clicked for me. It was one of those moments where you realize you’ve been seeing the same pattern play out for years, but you hadn’t quite said it out loud yet. We were talking about leadership. Not the [...]
Hiring always starts with the science. Experience, skills, and credentials are easy to measure. What actually determines success sits on the other side of that. Most hiring processes begin the same way. You look at a resume and confirm someone has done the job before. You check the boxes. [...]
