I’ve spent thirty years on one question: how do you make a customer feel known?
I learned the answer at Nordstrom, before software had anything to do with it. We wrote thank-you notes by hand. No template, no approvals. Just attention, practiced daily, compounding into a brand people still tell stories about. Then a decade at Microsoft, learning what scale does to intention. Then fourteen years running Tahzoo, the consultancy I founded in 2010 to build that standard into digital experiences for Starbucks, American Express, Wells Fargo, and roughly seventy other Global 1000 transformations.
Then AI arrived, and most companies started buying it with yesterday’s logic. Pilots, ROI decks, headcount math. The thirty-first year of the efficiency pitch.
Here’s what that misses. The enterprise AI getting funded right now models operations: plants, supply chains, logistics, the machinery of what a company does. Serious work, and largely spoken for. Nobody has modeled the customer. Not the transaction, the meaning behind it. What they intended. What they need next. Personalization says I know your name. Contextualization says I understand what you need next, and the distance between those two sentences is the whole opportunity.
That’s the layer I build. I conceived and built StoryShift, a graph-RAG platform that turns enterprise content into a governed knowledge graph, so AI answers can be trusted, traced, and cleared by the people who have to sign off. It runs at letsgobegreat.com. Most of my work now sits upstream of the software, with executive teams, working out whether their content, data, and feedback architecture can carry what they’ve already promised the board.
This publication is the argument in public. Thought Leadership holds the essays and whitepapers, and the book they’re building toward. The Desk is the weekly essay I’ve written since 2015, most of it never public: leadership, culture, and the occasional detour through Kant or the moral compass of middle schoolers. I’m releasing it here a piece at a time, alongside new work.
Efficiency was never the prize. Get this right and you don’t just run leaner, you build something worth caring about. That’s been the point the whole time: millions of people, a little bit happier, every day.
