Bio

I’ve lived a great life–and it wasn’t on purpose.  The blessings came and still come, undeservedly. I’m from a small, economically depressed town in Ohio (Youngstown–Jackson-Milton, actually), but I’ve worked in over 40 countries and 4 continents. I’ve advised governments, corporations, boards and major CEOs on a variety of things, stemming from nerdy topics (like enterprise risk management) to more exciting undertakings like how to build a framework for gathering information on your competitors, how to predict the growth of networks of agents for a product or how to make and live with tough, executive decisions.

My first job was cleaning horse stalls on a farm (where the pigs bossed me around) and my latest job (working for someone else, at least) was as the Chief Risk Officer and board secretary of the largest commercial bank in Africa–where I developed and directly managed 10 functions, 400 senior managers and created the world’s first mobile-money agency risk assessment framework. In between and up to today, I’ve worked as a labor strike negotiator (CUED), an analyst at what was once Bell Labs, a regulator (the New York Fed), a business school academic (Kellogg-HKUST), a corporate trainer (Euromoney) and now as a business owner, board advisor and consultant (Conquer) with over 250 institutional clients.

My education was similarly eclectic and fortunate, owing little to my own talents or brains. At Northwestern, I was mentored by the eminent economist, Bob Eisner and the mathematical analyst, Sandy Zabel. At Stanford (during a research program) I was taught by Nobel Laureates Milton Friedman and Kenneth Arrow. At Princeton, my thesis advisor was former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and I was fortunate enough to take graduate seminars from the genius, Fisher Black and the Nobel Laureates, John Nash and Daniel Kahneman.

Add my family, my friends, my travel and my lifestyle in Cyprus and I have truly lived a great life!