WHO WE ARE

A decidedly unconventional path connects a range of experiences and business contexts that Michael applies for higher organizational function. An engineer’s analytical nature combines with direct observation of workplace performance and behavior to find the commonalities across automotive, tech, entertainment, consumer packaged goods, restaurant, and Healthcare industries. With a bachelors in engineering, Michael began working professionally to design precision steel parts, and how those components function in complex machines. When an engineered solution seemed lacking in elegance, Michael sometimes found that nature had solutions of its own to offer. During the last few years of a decade spent in the Automotive Industry, Michael earned a graduate degree from the University of Michigan Business School. In that time, an intense focus on endurance sports further piqued appreciation of the body as an adaptive machine. Emerging from graduate school, Michael received an offer to pivot to a Human Resources career in California’s High Technology Industry. Michael’s second job in Human Resources is where he had the longest tenure, and there he learned an appreciation for simple-&-elegant solutions, though at times the lessons placed painful priority on outcomes over developmental methods. Michael’s third job in Human Resources was a mid-level manager role in a shell-shocked organization that had been bullied into burdensome, overcomplicated management processes. Michael’s philosophies and solutions came into focus on approaches to management that placed less of a tax on deliverables. Wielding increasing degrees of influence, he began to draw connections among mechanical, biological, and organizational systems, and the appropriateness of a lens that sees them all as adaptive machines. The culmination of a 16-year Human Resources career was foundational work for a Restaurant Industry start-up in which Michael set out to prove the adage that simplicity is scalable. The COVID-19 pandemic hit the Restaurant Industry particularly hard, and after leading the organization through two deep layoffs, Michael assessed the remaining organization and scheduled his own exit. Next came a segue into Healthcare. Over the course of San Francisco State University‘s premed program, Michael also pursued clinical experience. The coveted medical scribe opportunity fell through when the incumbent provider of those services failed to extend its contract with the local hospital’s emergency department. In light of doctors who wanted scribe services and scribes who wanted to go back to work, Michael organized an LLC in the State of California so that he could hire and deploy the scribes who had previously been working at the hospital, and also hired himself to train and work for the company he was running. In the emergency department, Michael’s 25 years of professional experience yielded good instincts while consulting patients and hospital staff. Michael also observed much about doctors, such as their work environments, their lifestyles, and in some cases, their pecuniary shortfalls. In his HR career, Michael theorized that worker burnout did not result from work that was merely hard, but rather from work that was hard yet unrewarded. The doctors he encountered remain devoted and passionate about their patients, yet many suffer from some degree of burnout, influenced by the rigors of the job combined with lifestyle rewards that fall short of their expectations. Consulting and coaching across industries, Michael leverages powerfully simple and versatile concepts in custom, optimized ways for each case, appreciating the exceptional uniqueness of each business while also beholding the common themes that repeatedly arise.