About

The work has one central claim: AI is a people problem disguised as a technology problem. I've spent two decades on the research side of that claim and almost as long on the practice side. The companies I work with use AI as a way to develop the human capability that turns out to matter more than the tools themselves.

The intellectual foundation for the work is a multi-year research partnership with MIT Sloan Management Review and Deloitte that surveyed 20,000+ executives and interviewed 150+ leaders. Two MIT Press books came out of that partnership: The Technology Fallacy (2019) and The Transformation Myth (2021). The Technology Fallacy has been translated into five languages.

In academic terms, I'm the C. Herman and Mary Virginia Terry Chair in Business Administration and Department Head of the Management Information Systems department at the University of Georgia's Terry College of Business. I was elected AIS Fellow in 2025 and named to the Elsevier Top 2% of Scientists worldwide. None of that is the point of the practice. It's the credibility infrastructure that lets me do the work.

The path here is unusual.

I started as an ordained United Methodist minister, one of five clergy at a 5,000-member congregation in Dunwoody, Georgia. I spent twelve years there learning how to lead a volunteer-driven organization where authority depended on inspiration and influence rather than command and control. That work taught me that the binding constraint on any human organization is rarely the technical or strategic question. It's whether people will actually do the thing.

I left the ministry in 2006 to start a PhD at Emory, came up through Boston College as a faculty member for sixteen years, served as Faculty Director of the Shea Center for Entrepreneurship, spent the 2019–2020 academic year as a Visiting Scholar at Harvard Business School, and joined UGA in 2022 to lead the MIS department.

Based in greater Atlanta. Available for engagements nationally and internationally.