Communications/public affairs leader, board member, Pulitzer-nominated former journalist, former senior advisor and speechwriter at the U.S. State Department, TEDx speaker, Techstars mentor, author, investor, professor. As founder of StoryVenture, I act as a co-pilot to help organizations deploy thought leadership and broader communications strategies for impact.
You're only a child once. Capturing the world through young eyes is difficult. Backpacks and Baguettes attempts to better understand what children think, see, feel, and smell when they travel. Everything is new, and everyone is a possible friend.
The book is reminder of what it was like to be in the world before the pandemic hit - the sound of mopeds in Vietnam, the smell of the chicken turning on a spit at a French market, a water fight in Bangkok, mushroom hunting in the hills of Tuscany, the feel of fog on your face in the San Francisco bay - human contact.
Your guide is Sam, a half-American/half British-boy who so far in his young life has been lucky to grow up in Paris and Washington, D.C.. Sam loves soccer and food and is curious about how people in other countries live their lives. He thinks graffiti and street art are better than postcards to truly understand a place. He's even included some authentic global graffiti in the book for you to color. He's also left space on the back of each image for you to draw your own graffiti or take notes.
Sam's stories are about asking questions until you're exhausted. They're about not caring what people think. They're about smiling and laughing until it hurts and playing until you scrape your knees. They're about letting your imagination run wild. They're about realizing in one breath that children are different, but ultimately the same all around the world. They're about being a kid once.
Bandwidth - financial & tech thriller
Bandwidth captures the two dominant threads of the first decade of the 21st century - greed and terrorism.
Several years after the dot.com funeral pyre, Hayden Campbell - a former CIA operative turned speechwriter - finds himself working for the sixth richest man in the world, Aaron Cannondale. From his perch, Hayden watches as a Dutch student discovers a technology to send voice, video and data through Europe's municipal water systems.
Bandwidth takes us from the stoops of Brooklyn, to Moscow and Zurich, to the bike paths of Amsterdam and the backrooms of Brussels and Frankfurt, to Afghanistan and the hazy diwans of Yemen.
Dazzled by his new boss but harboring a soft spot for the Agency, Hayden allows himself to be pulled back in for one more run - a run that reminds him that people aren't what they seem, a run that reinforces his belief that greed has no sell-by date.