I was afraid to share my cancer diagnosis on LinkedIn; I feared that corporate America would not hire me. Who am I? Why am I here?

Is executive consulting good for me, or anyone else?

In November of 2021, I was diagnosed with stage 4 metastatic colon cancer. After a very aggressive course of treatments and major surgery to remove ~16 tumors from my body, I am in a pretty improbable state of NED (no evidence of detectable disease), and my longevity is, at least, potentially extended.

I've been very open and candid about my experience since then, but I've hidden it from LinkedIn because I have no faith in our American Corporate culture not to put me on a "don't hire the cancer guy" list.

Since then, I've realized that being inauthentic here has yet to serve my business or my family in the ways I'd hoped it might.

So, who am I then?

Around 24 years ago, I excitedly joined many of my peers entering the exploding technology industry.

I worked in technical roles at a web analytics startup/scaleup for many years, earnestly seeking to understand how things worked so I could help.

I quickly realized my technical role wasn't respected. People in our role had zero agency or decision-making authority.

We were, at best, rubber stamps.

As I realized the problems surrounding software development, it became apparent that the development wasn't the overarching problem. Development techniques could be improved, and indeed have been in many ways, without meaningfully altering the business' profitability, employee wealth, or customer satisfaction.

I expressed these concerns, and some testing "thought leader" said, "Who died such that made you the product manager?"

So I realized that I'd need to explore product and portfolio management to address the strategic issues facing product development organizations to understand how and why investments were allocated to outcomes.

Thus began approximately a decade of working through the guise of business agility with many senior enterprise tech executives and founders to try and understand the nature of this problem to design interventions and experiments to help mitigate or solve them.

I was naive, which would become more evident as I learned proven techniques to solve some of the business' hairiest and most bemoaned problems.

"We want data to understand performance."

"We want to know when something is going to be delivered."

With the help of many more significant thinkers than myself, I strived to deeply understand these problems so I could help fix them for clients. Many of those thinkers were kind and generous to me with their time and thoughts, and I'm forever grateful to them.

My business did well over the last 13 years. I got to speak at many international conferences, made great lifelong friends, and learned so much in my many waves of panic to prepare to lead workshops, speak or consult executive clients.

I've never been on a performance improvement plan in my entire technology career. I've never been formally reprimanded. Several executives have angrily fired me for "no cause," I assure you, I comported myself professionally with them.

This is not to say I have only had poor leaders employ me. Unify Consulting was my best full-time employer because they didn't have abusive management practices, and as long as I remained profitable, they allowed me agency in how I plied my trade for them.

I had to step off my happy client in December of 2022 due to surgical recovery challenges and a personal decision to hand my client off to a peer who could focus more energy on this client's behalf than I could. This put me on the bench in December/January of 2022/3 when the layoff apocalypse hit everyone else too. I have no hard feelings for Unify doing what they needed to do and would work for them again without reservation.

Now that my time is limited, I'm less fearful of long-term financial ruin than I have been most of my career. I grew up destitute in an abusive household. I dropped out of high school in my sophomore year and, due to various circumstances, never returned to school. I've had zero money, zero prospects to get any, and only a small sack of dried oats gifted me by a dear friend to sustain me. When that's in your memory, it's tough not to fear it coming for your kids later.

This is why I dove so deeply into strategic executive leadership, organizational design structures, the end-to-end flow of customer value, and product investment strategy.

I am proud of the expertise I've gained and thankful to many others who allowed me to stand on their shoulders and learn from them.

Sadly, my experience in the enterprise has been disappointing. I've had agile transformation leaders become angry with me for teaching probabilistic forecasting to willing orgs who requested the training. I've been gaslighted by SVPs and C-level executives. I've been angrily fired without cause.

I learned that this stereotype of the avaricious corporate consultant, only interested in billing clients and utterly disinterested in the outcomes their clients produce, is, in many ways, a direct result of the system whereby leaders hire experts but expect not to change anything. Protecting the status quo is not a natural state for a change consultant.

So, here I sit, trying to figure out what I want to do with the remainder of my time. This post may make me more unemployable, but given the infrequency with which folks seem to research, I doubt it'll make an impact.

If you know what I should do next, tell me what you think.

I care a lot more about creating an example for my two young boys about prioritizing the betterment of society than mere empty service to capital.

That said, I gotta make some money, as I won't be gone before our savings are. But I care a lot more about how I make that money than how much I make.

If you read this far, thanks for your time and attention. Please feel free to comment if I'm committing career suicide here. I've always valued being authentic, vulnerable, and genuine with my peers, friends, and clients, wherever possible. I have had great clients, and I have subbed for great firms. I've been luckier than anyone deserves. This post is not to denigrate my clients; it is to say I want to do more, to be more, and to give more.

Call to action

What, dear reader, do I hope to gain from this post? Ideas, support, being told I'm an asshole. It's all useful data. If you know me and what I'm good at, I'd love to hear your ideas about where I should seek to land. Many people have kindly told me I could "pick whatever job I want," but that's not been the case. I'm done taking whatever turns up. Help me find something worth doing.

Given the interest in these topics lately, I feel like I'll be writing more about executive sociopathy and systemic impediments to improvement moving forward. If nobody reads what I have to say, it'll be a helpful signal that I should stop saying it. Consider this an aspirational first post on this journey toward meaning, hopefully, not starvation.