Life Is Beautiful

I’m a husband, a father, and someone who’s genuinely happier mid-problem than mid-holiday. After a decade and change in the corporate world, my wife and I decided to pick up the family and move abroad to replenish and refocus on what matters: family, health, and well-being. We spent time in Spain, then Germany, and eventually landed on an island, which we now call home. We’ve moved when an environment stopped fitting and stayed when it did. Nothing in my life ranks above family and a small circle of good people. Everything else is negotiable.

I’ve left the corporate world and walked back into it when the problem was interesting enough. So I’ll be straight with you: I’m settled here, building my own things, and still open to the right challenge. Both can be true.

Getting to spend real time with my kids has been one of the things I’m most grateful for. The way my wife and I try to raise them, they’ve ended up teaching us as much about ourselves as we teach them.

I’ve been a full-performance athlete since I was a kid, at heart anyway. I ran my first marathon at twelve. Since then it’s been martial arts (first-degree black belt), track, soccer, American football, and eventually triathlon, which is where I’ve landed. Road biking is my favorite discipline. I’ve finished Ironmans, which taught me more about patience and process than any boardroom ever did.

I love food. Not casually. I love cooking it, I love eating it, and I lean on my wife to keep the training from being quietly undone by the kitchen. My kids seem to have inherited it. No complaints.

Life, to me, is a mindset. Soak in your surroundings as best you can and never stop engaging. The trick is balancing ambition and hard work against the things that actually matter, without compromising on either. I’ve been lucky enough to build a life around that. Now I’m after the next set of challenges.

I’m a leader at heart, and the through-line of my career has never been a title. It’s a pattern: drop into something complex, learn it fast, make it work. Corporate operator, founder, operations lead, communications guy, sports operator. I’m at my best when I’m slightly out of my depth and working it out.

I spent about a decade at HP and HPE, climbing from customer support to Chief of Staff. Along the way I managed budgets north of $12 million, teams of 400-plus, and more than 120 cross-border projects across Europe. I led part of the EMEA Order-to-Cash separation when HP split into two companies, which is exactly as messy as it sounds.

After that I ran regional operations for Lime in Germany, then led operational excellence, where I took a workflow that had been broken for ten years and rebuilt it in four weeks. That one saved €360,000. Not because I’m a genius, but because nobody had stopped to actually look at it. Most “impossible” problems are just unexamined ones.

Then my wife and I did the least corporate thing imaginable: we took over a racket sports facility and turned it into a five-star operation in two and a half years. Systems, suppliers, bilingual content across hotel groups and town halls, all built from scratch. Different world, same pattern.

I speak English, German, Spanish, and Turkish. I hold a degree in business, a Master’s, a Lean Six Sigma Green Belt, and a CAPM. Useful tools, though none of them taught me as much as the actual fixing did. These days I run my own business, invest when something’s genuinely worth it, and still make time to mentor and coach people from every walk of life. That part matters to me, because leadership was never about climbing. It’s about helping other people rise.

I take ideas apart, look at them from every angle, then put them back together simply enough that I could explain them to my kids. That isn’t dumbing things down. It’s how I know I actually understand something. If you can’t explain it plainly, you probably don’t.

What I share here is a mix of my own interests and whatever I happen to be chewing on, run through a fair bit of reading, research, and second-guessing before I’ll put it in front of you. I don’t buy a lot of the conventional wisdom out there. What I do believe is simpler and harder: pain is part of life, we’re all flawed, growth lives outside the comfort zone, identity is obnoxious, and the real work is positive progress.

I still have plenty to learn, so I won’t pretend to have every answer. What’s here is my perspective and worldview, and it keeps shifting as I do. If some of it is useful to you, that’s the whole point.

This website first went online in 2008, and it’s been through more iterations, failures, and rebuilds than I can count. Fitting, really.

It’s where I think out loud about mindset, performance, business, and process. Some of it is hard-won, some I’m still working out in real time. The goal stays simple: practical thinking you can use, at work and in life. No gurus, no shortcuts.

If you’ve read this far, reach out. Tell me what you’re building, what’s broken, or just argue with me. I’m always up for a good conversation over better coffee. Welcome to my corner of the web.

Mindset First. Keep thriving. HK