Engines dead. Five Beaufort winds. A patrol ship drifting in open water. Twenty men staring at me — waiting for direction, waiting for calm, waiting for a decision. In those thirty minutes, while we fought to restart the engines, I felt the weight of accountability in its purest form. Fear was on every face, including mine. My first job wasn’t to solve the problem — it was to steady myself so that I could steady them. Only then could we focus on the solution instead of the danger surrounding us.
Years later, as I led technology teams, I realized how familiar that feeling was. A system crash, a cyber incident, a project spiraling off-course — the team looks to the CIO in the same way my crew looked at me on that ship. The data is incomplete, the risks are real and the clock is merciless. And just like at sea, calm is contagious. If the leader panics, the team collapses.
My career has taken me from commanding a naval vessel to writing code as a junior engineer, to founding a company and eventually to executive roles leading global technology initiatives. Every stage forced me to reinvent myself, often painfully, always urgently. Reinvention isn’t optional — it’s the core skill that has kept me relevant across two completely different worlds.
