About Michael

Current Practice

I work with organizations navigating the threshold between familiar digital practices and emerging realities—where the barriers to transformation are as much cultural as technical.

My portfolio career rests on three interconnected pillars: Digital Excellence, non-executive governance, and coaching for leaders managing complexity. The model is deliberate. After thirty years inside large organizations, I came to understand that meaningful digital transformation demands more than technical expertise. It requires someone who can sit in a boardroom and translate technical implications into strategic language, who recognizes the human dimensions of organizational change, and who has learned—sometimes the hard way—what happens when cultural realities are ignored in the pursuit of operational objectives.

The Digital Excellence work is fully active: assessing organizational readiness for shifts like the EU Digital Product Passport requirements, helping companies understand not just compliance mechanics but what these changes mean for their business models and operating cultures. The governance pillar is expanding into non-executive director roles where technical depth meets strategic oversight. The coaching pillar—grounded in Growth Edge certification through Cultivating Leadership—is emerging, because the leaders I work with face pressures that no framework alone can resolve.

What makes this combination useful is the cross-pollination. Governance insights inform consulting work. Coaching reveals leadership patterns that matter for board effectiveness. Technical depth prevents any of it from becoming abstract.

Professional Background

My current chapter began, as these things sometimes do, with someone else's opportunity. My wife found a career role in Vienna, Austria, and that move became the catalyst for rethinking everything.

I had spent over twenty years at Pitney Bowes Software, progressing from engineering team leader to Managing Director of Professional Services for the Americas—managing teams across the US, Canada, Brazil, and India, leading enterprise implementations for organizations like CVS and GE. It was a career built on translating technical complexity into business value. But during an MBA program at WPI, the intersection of academic frameworks with lived experience brought something into sharp focus: I had watched organizational strategy designed and executed without accounting for deeply embedded culture, and I had seen the human cost when that goes wrong. Authors like Bob Kegan and Jennifer Garvey Berger gave language to patterns I had been living through for years.

That recognition reshaped everything. I completed the Growth Edge coaching certification through Cultivating Leadership in 2018, not as a career pivot but because the work I wanted to do required it. I had also been watching fundamental shifts in data privacy and digital identity from the other side of the table—the gathering and aggregation side—and could see where things were heading. Starting independently through The Dingle Group meant I could follow those questions honestly, without shutting down the parts of myself that corporate life had required me to set aside.

The work evolved from decentralized identity architecture into Digital Product Passports, supply chain transparency, and data sovereignty. I now chair the UN/CEFACT UNTP Adoption Working Group and have chaired standards activity for IEEE/UL 2933-2024. The Aeolian Discourse—originally the Vienna Digital Identity Event—has hosted nearly fifty fireside chats and roundtables exploring questions that don't yet have settled answers.

My academic background combines mechanical engineering, automation engineering, and an MBA focused on innovation and entrepreneurship.

Approach & Philosophy

I start from a simple observation: the organizations struggling most with digital transformation are rarely struggling with technology. They are struggling with the cultural shift that technology demands.

My work sits at the intersection where technical systems meet human systems. Whether assessing Digital Product Passport readiness, advising a board on digital governance, or coaching a leader through uncertainty, I bring the same question: what needs to change that isn't on the project plan?

I raise questions more than I deliver answers. I believe the most valuable thing I can offer is not expertise—though three decades of it inform every conversation—but the capacity to help people see what they're not yet seeing. Sometimes that means translating between technical and non-technical worlds. Sometimes it means naming the cultural barrier no one wants to acknowledge.

If this resonates, I've written more about the journey that brought me here: [The Long Way Round to the Right Work →]

To discuss your organization's challenges or explore how this experience might be relevant: Contact me

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