For over a decade, I kept a blog for no one in particular: not for clients, not for publication, other than my weekly publishing to an anonymous void. I wrote to think through a difficult season, reflecting out loud on what it takes to lead and live well. Through that writing, I not only discovered my own voice, but also like-minded professionals whose writing and thought leadership influenced my own and the trajectory of my career. Those reflections became Walking the Heart Path, published under my original brand, Heart by Design, and later recognized with a Bronze IPPY Award and a Gold Living Now Book Award.
At the time, the writing was personal — one person, working out one life. But the questions underneath it never stayed personal for long. What does it mean to lead authentically? How do I live and lead in alignment with my core values? How do I lead with integrity in a world where we cannot agree on what integrity means or why it matters? What are my strengths, and how can I leverage them to create lasting impact? If this is what it takes for one person to align intention with action, what does that alignment look like across a team? An organization? A community trying to navigate and move together under pressure and constraint?
Those questions are the actual throughline from Walking the Heart Path to HBD Global. The individual work didn’t get left behind. It became the innermost ring of a larger system. The Human by Design mark reflects this directly: a single point, expanding outward through team, organization, and community. Each ring is built on the same underlying capability, the ability to align self with system, intention with structure; the ability to create conditions that foster trust despite difference, and enable decisions to hold under pressure and sustain over time, instead of quietly unraveling once the room empties out.
I’ve spent thirty years moving between two worlds that most people keep separate. One is the strategic, analytical work of international affairs, economic development, and Fortune 50 consulting. The other is a quieter creative practice of writing and visual art. For a long time I treated them as parallel tracks, unable to effectively integrate the two worlds in a way that made sense to others. It took years to openly acknowledge they were never separate tracks at all. The same instinct that reads a boardroom reads a canvas. The same discipline that maps a five-year strategy shows up in a stanza. One practice sharpens the other.
That sharpening is the same principle and creative process that sit underneath the professional work: seeing patterns, and opportunity, amidst chaos and conflict, naming what I see, and helping leaders navigate real moments of pressure, change, complexity, and disruption.
Walking the Heart Path was where these ideas first took shape, at the scale of one person. HBD Global is where they expand and compound — moving from the ideal to the practical, to meet the scale of the rooms leaders actually have to work in.