That phone call is the reason I have the career I have. I have come to believe the most important doors in a life rarely look like doors when they first appear. They open sideways, disguised as unlikely questions from people who have no idea what you are capable of.
For ten years I was a youth minister. I loved it, loved helping teenagers walk through one of the most challenging passages of life. I still love helping people and working with young people especially. But underneath all of it, deep down, I wanted to be a technology consultant. I had no idea how a person became one. I had no plan, no degree that pointed there, and no reason to think it was available to me. Little did I know that a phone call and my father were about to put me on that road.
My dad was a high school dropout and a lifelong entrepreneur who was fascinated by every gadget that came along. When he upgraded his computer, he handed the old IBM PS/2 down to me. The first time I sat in front of it, something clicked the way it does for a person who sits at a piano they have never touched and simply plays. Then that Christmas he handed me a wrapped box with IBM OS/2 Warp inside, and I spent six months learning it for no reason except love.
So when Eddie asked his question, expecting nothing, I had an answer. Eddie and Robert, the business division CIO, interviewed me the next day and hired me on the spot, into the Marketing Information Systems lab at BellSouth Small Business. The engineers there lived inside a single analytics tool. It was called Metaphor, and it only ran on OS/2.
Life has a sense of humor, and it is patient. Sometimes it hands you the thesis of your story decades early, disguised as a support ticket. Little did I know that Eddie, a very senior level technlogist, and Robert, the CIO, would become mentors to me. I soon became the CIO's gopher, doing whatever he needed while soaking up all I could in the enterprise technology world
Then, before I had properly unpacked, the World Wide Web arrived. A memo went around the industry calling it a tidal wave, and for once the memo was right. I was installing Mosaic on corporate machines and being asked to build an intranet before most of us could define the word. That was the first of five waves I have now watched come through, and it set the pattern for all of them.
Build a corporate help desk. Roll out TCP/IP. Put a browser on every desk. Build this intranet thing, whatever it is. Each time I said yes to something I did not understand yet, and then went and understood it, or found the person who did and learned from them. I have never found a better method.
That is also how the shape of the work changed. I started on the help desk fixing what other people had built. Then I was designing the solutions instead of repairing them. Then I was drawing the architecture underneath the solutions. Nobody formally promoted me through any of that. They just kept asking, and I kept saying yes, and one day I looked up and I was the person in the room with the whiteboard marker.
The interesting question about AI was never what it can do. It is whether the people around it will trust it, and whether they should.
That hesitation you see in your organization is not ignorance. The people asking the hardest questions are usually the ones worth listening to.
The long version How I think about AI → my journey Twenty-five years, one subject →I am not looking for a job. I am always glad to be on a stage, and I bring the same thing to a keynote that I bring to a client: plain language, real examples, and no pretending the hard parts are easy.
Why capable people get poor results from AI, and why the fix is a communication skill rather than a technical one. Works as a keynote or a hands-on session.
What changes when your output can end up in a due process hearing or an audit. Written for education and government leaders who cannot afford a confident wrong answer.
Governance, interoperability, and analytics for agencies that have to serve everyone, including the districts that cannot afford a data team.
A keynote at an IBM and Lotus symposium in Atlanta, back when I was still explaining what the web was. A motivational session for close to a thousand customers and prospects. Leadership retreats for state education agencies working through what AI means for them. Corporate all-hands sessions. Conference stages, classrooms, and more than a few school board meetings.
That took me a long time to learn, and learning it is the best thing I have done. These days the people in my life get the version of me that the machines used to get.
I am married to a woman who makes me laugh every day. I have two amazing daughters and an amazing stepdaughter who all grew up into remarkable women, and a big batch of grandchildren who have made me a considerably less serious person than I used to be. Being a good dad was always the assignment I cared most about. Being a good grandfather turns out to be the sequel nobody warns you is even better.
I play guitar, badly enough to enjoy it and well enough to keep going. I still love the messy parts of other people’s lives, which is what made me a decent youth pastor thirty years ago and probably what makes me a decent consultant now.
It is about technology as a metaphor for human relationship. Boot sequences and self-tests. Protocols and handshakes. Bandwidth, and what happens when someone you love has none left. Technical debt, and the fact that the bill always arrives. It is what happens when a systems guy finally turns his tools around and points them at his own heart.
He never finished high school. He ran a debt collection agency and a bicycle shop, and he introduced BMX racing to the state of Georgia in the seventies. He had no training in any of it. He was just curious about everything and unafraid of being new at something, which is the only inheritance I have ever really needed. He also handed me the computer that started all of this.
Technology has never been the hard part. The hard part is the space between people.