About

I got my undergraduate degree in English from Harvard, my master’s degree in Communication

from Michigan State University, and my PhD from Stanford in Communication. My research

focus was on the culture of organizations. I had the good fortune to do a sabbatical year

working at W. L. Gore & Associates, the company well known for its GORE-TEX ® outerwear

products.

My year at Gore changed my view on what was possible in organizations. I came to see that a

good organizational culture actually could promote human flourishing at work.

After my sabbatical year, I ended up working extensively as a consultant for Gore, about 100 to

150 days per year for 12 years. I was responsible for the design, administration, data analysis

and feedback to Associates on an annual Gore culture survey. This effort, which took up most

of my summers and took me around the Gore world from Newark, Delaware to Flagstaff and

Phoenix Arizona, to Germany, Scotland, France, Italy and elsewhere in Europe, and occasionally

even to Hong Kong, Singapore, and China. Through my exposure to the Gore global

environment, I ended up working on virtually any project that had anything to do with culture.

But also with leadership development efforts at the divisional and corporate level, and with

facilitating strategy development sessions for individual businesses as well as for the enterprise

as a whole.

In 1996, I left academia and joined Gore as a full-time Associate, where I worked until 2013.

In 2013, as my Gore career was winding down, I had the good fortune of being recruited for the

Gore-Giovale Chair in Business Innovation in the Bill and Vieve Gore School of Business at

Westminster College in Salt Lake City, Utah. (Bill was an alumnus of Westminster.). At

Westminster, I founded the Center for Innovative Culture. The Center gave me a chance to

reflect on my experiences at Gore, but to broaden my understanding of high-performing

organizational cultures by researching several exemplary organizations, plus meeting with

countless forward-thinking executives and cutting-edge academics and business thought

leaders, all of whom were engaged, as one of those thought leaders put it, in “creating

organizations fit for the future—and fit for human beings.”

My efforts at the Center led to numerous workshops in the US and Europe, as well as two

books: The Thriving Organization and a day-in-the-life study of a radically innovative

organization entitled A Friday Filled with Joy.

Since my retirement from Westminster in 2020, I have been working on taking my lessons

learned about organizational culture, and seeing them anew through the lens of my Catholic

faith. I offer as I can workshops and presentations to help people understand how they can

promote their faith journey at work, with a particular focus on having them understand the

ways in which the culture of their organization can hinder or help them in doing good work and

flourishing at work and through work.

Clearly my expertise is in organizational culture, and not in moral theology. But I hope that

what I have to offer as someone trying to be a retired devout Catholic layman will be of some

use to those still in the world of work.