Born in Duluth, Minnesota
Homecroft Elementary through fifth grade.
Auction crew, age five to eighteen
Dad called the auctions; Mom clerked them for forty years. I worked up from slip runner to hot dog vendor to cashier. Bankruptcy auctions are where badly designed organizations transfer their assets to well-run ones, at a discount, on a Saturday.
Lake Minnesuing, Wisconsin
Graduated second in the class. Helped add a class period so a few of us could take four years of a foreign language. Founded the Spanish club and an FBLA chapter.
A trimester in South Africa
A teenager from rural Wisconsin during apartheid. It changed how I saw the world and probably why I ended up in Social Studies.
Sales associate
Ran the register, cut rope and keys, mixed paint, stocked shelves.
Rotary exchange to Finland
A tour guide told us the Soviet joke: "We pretend to work because they pretend to pay us." I still teach it.
Harvard College
Dorm Crew and the library the first year, then bartending for Harvard Student Agencies as needed, then student assistant at the Gutman Conference Center, setting up and breaking down events. Harvard Model Congress Europe; president of the Center for International Affairs student group; Dorot Fellowship for research in Israel. Thesis on the political and economic forces behind NAFTA.
Sales Manager
Learned how incentives drive behavior.
Business Banker
Approved commercial loans upstairs while the floor below ran algorithm-approved consumer loans. That building became a chapter in Judgment Call.
Compensation Analyst
Built pay structures while finishing the M.A. in human resources and industrial relations at Minnesota. Spent the last semester at ESADE in Barcelona.
Program Manager
Watched a company grow fast and hit the wall in 2001. Ran training in the HR organization; an award for process improvement in the Global Sales Organization.
Business Banking Manager, Vice President
Home to the Iron Range.
Candidate, Minnesota State Senate, District 6
A run against Tom Bakk on the Iron Range: 9,467 votes, 27.44 percent. Results.
Chair of the Board and Executive Director
A nonprofit software incubator. The first incubator I ran, and an honest teardown in book two.
Instructor
Compensation; Union Organizing and Labor Relations; international HR in the China Executive MBA in Guangzhou.
Assistant Professor of Management
Ph.D. from the Carlson School in 2009, on the hidden costs and benefits of outsourcing HR. The survey categories in that dissertation became the DART model.
Professional in Human Resources (PHR)
Recertified in 2012.
Adjunct Professor
Including organizational behavior for the MBA program in Singapore.
Visiting professor in Albania
Five trips teaching HR, entrepreneurship, and management.
Acting Associate Dean
Fundraising for the college's first trading lab, a strategic plan for AACSB, and a modernized advising center.
Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR)
Department Chair, Management and Marketing
Four concentrations, 1,747 seats, 25 instructors, three faculty searches. Tenured in 2013; full professor in 2018.
Statewide Senator
Faculty Affairs chair for three terms, secretary, and vice chair for the 23-campus system.
Outstanding Professor of the Year Award
Named the university's professor of the year.
Faculty mentor, George Marsh Applied Cognition Lab
Brought business students into the psychology lab that 60 Minutes and National Geographic visited. The OLE Lab grew out of it.
Candidate, LA Community College District Board, Seat 2
Citywide, four candidates, 71,170 votes. Ballotpedia.
Faculty founder, Innovation Incubator
Founding chair of the advisory board; 30-plus ventures mentored.
Gallup-Certified Strengths Coach
Course January 29 to February 2; certified May 11, 2018; renewed in 2020 and 2022.
Stanford Life Design Studio
A June session on campus with my CSUDH colleague Brenda Riddick, learning to teach life design to our students.
Co-founded the CSU Job Shadow program
Three Dominguez Hills students the first year; 33 students from eight campuses and 59 alumni by 2025.
Home to San Pedro
Where the Port of Los Angeles meets the Palos Verdes hills, about as far from Lake Minnesuing as a kid from a class of twenty could have imagined ending up.
Organized the Public Sector Career Exploration Series
As co-chair of the working group "How to Get a Government Job," I developed the series: seven monthly virtual sessions, May through November 2021, each built around an occupation and featuring federal, state, and local employers, to steer students and alumni toward public-sector careers.
President, Rotary Club of San Pedro
On the cover of San Pedro Today with the board.
Outstanding Service Award
Recognizing faculty contributions to university governance and development, including the Innovation Incubator. CSUDH News.
Assistant Professor
Back to the North Shore for a semester: HR, entrepreneurship, and strategy.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson at CSUDH
A Harvard '92 classmate. I invited her to campus at our reunion; on October 23, 2025 she gave "Lessons from My Life in the Law" to a full house. Watch the lecture.
CSU Generative AI Committee
Appointed through the Academic Senate of the CSU to the systemwide committee's subcommittee; kickoff July 2025.
Interim faculty director, Innovation Incubator
Nine years after helping found it, I now direct it.
Two textbooks and a trade series
The DART model becomes the spine of everything I write. Superior AI Consulting opens the AI Small Business Lab.
Places I have lived
Duluth, Lake Minnesuing, Grahamstown, Cambridge, Bloomington, Duluth again, the Twin Cities, Barcelona, the Bay Area, the Iron Range, Duluth a third time, Saint Paul, Carson, and San Pedro since 2015.
A map and the stories behind each stop are coming to placesilived.com, and the trips to normantravels.com.