Not a prophet. Not a trend-forecaster. A navigator. A practice for leaders holding three things in view at once — where they are, where they're going, and what is changing on the road between.
Three decades at the intersection of business leadership and emerging technology.
[PLACEHOLDER: one or two sentences on specific firms, roles, industries, exits, or accomplishments that earn ethos.] I have advised founders, built companies, and studied — in real operating conditions, not in a classroom — what actually changes when the ground moves under a business.
Twice in my career I have watched a generation of leaders get caught looking backward when they could have been looking forward. I am not willing to watch it happen again.
What three decades of operators have taught me is simple: the leaders who thrive in change are not the ones who predict it. They are the ones who prepare for it with an uncommon mix of discipline and imagination.
If Cullintel is the institutional voice of this practice — business intelligence, AI strategy, research — this is the human one.
Three commitments held in tension. Not one at a time. All three, always.
The present did not invent itself. Every strong move forward rests on patterns, institutions, and hard-won lessons that deserve study, not dismissal. Aristotle named the three modes of persuasion more than two thousand years ago. They still work. The Renaissance was not novelty — it was a return, older wisdom applied to new tools. The Celts carved it as the triskele: three arms in perpetual motion, each turn informing the next.
The most common leadership failure I see is not the wrong bet on the future. It is the refusal to see the present clearly. What is actually true, right now, about your customers, your costs, your capabilities, your competition? Clarity about the present is not a pre-condition for strategy. It is strategy. Most of what gets called strategic work is a dignified form of avoidance.
Preparation is not prediction. You do not have to know exactly what the road ahead holds. You have to build the capacity to read the road, respond, and reposition faster than the people you are competing with. In Latin: festina lente. Make haste, slowly. Move with urgency and care at the same time.
For most of business history, strategy had a long half-life. A good plan could hold for five to ten years, sometimes more. That world is ending.
AI. Power economics. Demographic shift. Capital reconfiguration. Geopolitical realignment. Any one of these would have been the story of a decade ten years ago. Now they are happening simultaneously, compounding on each other, and none of them are slowing down.
"The leaders I speak with are not asking whether to change. They are asking how fast, in which direction, and what to keep."
The danger is not obsolescence by neglect. It is obsolescence by enthusiasm — chasing every new tool, pivoting on every new signal, mistaking motion for progress. The antidote is not caution. It is posture. Knowing where you stand. Knowing where you are going. Paying close attention to what is actually changing between those two points.
If that sounds like common sense, it is. Common sense is rare in this moment. That is why the work exists.
Bounded engagements. Working tools. Sketches from the future. Each mode is designed for operators, not theorists.
A small number of founders and senior operators per year. Deep, bounded work — typically 90 days — focused on a specific transition your business is trying to make. Not coaching. Not ten-person-team consulting. One-to-one strategic partnership with a futurist posture.
The frameworks built over more than twenty years — The Cullinane Methodology, the 5 Es, [Framework 2], [Framework 3] — available as working tools. Some are free and open. Some live inside advisory engagements. All are designed for operators, not theorists.
The Substack. Where the thinking happens out loud — essays, patterns, half-formed ideas that may harden into methods later, and may not. If you want to see how the work develops before it gets polished, read here.
A small Renaissance workroom, open to visitors. What has come before and what is forming now.
Festina lente.