It was inevitable that I’d become fascinated with leadership and complex systems.
I was born in a tight-knit immigrant community in Pittsburgh, but my father’s work with the United Nations shaped a childhood that unfolded across the African continent. Every few years, we called a new country home. Emboldened by a fearless mother who embraced ambiguity with gusto, change became our normal. To adapt to the frequent change, I developed an early instinct to understand the human stories and dynamics shaping the systems we lived in.
In college and graduate school, no one was surprised when I chose to study security and intelligence studies. I immersed myself in the analysis of power: political systems, leadership, and institutional structures.
That path led me to the African Union during the Arab Spring. As a speechwriter, I witnessed history unfold: governments rising and toppling, elections upheld and contested, democracies gaining and losing ground. Amid it all, my pen drafted communications for leaders from the Chairman of the AU to ambassadors. It was a front-row view of stability’s fragility in the face of leaders’ judgment, courage, and conviction.
Heeding the private sector call, I joined an investment fund and spun off a social enterprise with global customers and operations in India. It was rewarding and painful: building a two-sided market, reshaping the product for profitability, and carrying the weight of payroll and strategy. I returned to that same fund years later as COO and drove a cultural and operational turnaround.
After India, I headed to Zambia, where I took on the Country Director role for an Australian firm. I rebuilt our advisory arm and led large public-private infrastructure investments that married business and government.
Eventually, the pace caught up with me. Tired in ways that weren’t just physical, I moved back to the United States in search of my North Star. Serendipitously, I found my way to World 50, a private, invitation-only platform for leaders of the world’s most influential organizations, where they confronted their most consequential decisions and shaped the trajectory of global enterprises. There, I led three client groups of Fortune 500 divisional presidents, CEOs, and legal executives, seeing them at the highest peaks and lowest valleys of their careers. It was a privilege.
Those trusted relationships led to requests for me to help their teams navigate critical inflection points: a new strategy that wasn’t cascading, an executive team that was misaligned, tension between core and non-core businesses, and inefficient governance structures.
And that’s where a pattern became obvious. Strategy problems were rarely about the strategy itself. Slowed execution was symptomatic of broken trust or misalignment. And market failures often exposed hidden fractures and deferred decisions.
35,000 feet over the Atlantic Ocean on a 15-hour flight home from facilitating a CEO offsite, the thought settled in: there was a deeper way of working with leaders and teams, and I was going to devote my life to it. The Trium Group and I found each other, and joining the team was the most obvious and natural continuation of that thread.
Today, I live outside Atlanta with my beautifully loud family, surrounded by a vibrant Congolese American community and a circle of fascinating friends. In Zambia, my family and I own two farms, a rural bar, and a taxi business, and Belgium and Zambia have become second homes.
I’d like to think five-year-old me would be endlessly fascinated.
