My Story
From Jackson to the World
Igrew up in Jackson, Michigan. Small city, conservative roots, the kind of place where ambition meant getting a good job and staying close to home. I had other ideas — I just didn't know what they were yet.
I went to NYU for my MBA, arrived in Manhattan as a kid from Michigan who thought he knew what hustle looked like, and September 11th happened six blocks away. That morning changed the direction of everything.
Within two years I was in Tajikistan as a Peace Corps volunteer. Within four years I was a USAID development contractor managing programs across Central Asia. Within six years I was embedded with the U.S. military in Diyala Province, Iraq — one of the most violent places on earth in 2007 — running neighborhood reconstruction programs and negotiating with tribal sheikhs who held more actual power than any government official I ever met.
Then Afghanistan. Then home.
The eight years abroad built something in me that no classroom and no boardroom ever could have. The ability to read a room before sitting down in it. To know within minutes whether someone is authentic or performing. To stay calm when the situation is not. To make decisions when the information is incomplete and the clock is running. None of that came from business school. It came from the field.
Fifteen Years. One of Detroit's Longest-Serving Executives.
In 2011, Mayor Dave Bing personally tasked me with fixing Detroit's streetlights and leading the city's energy policy. That mandate became the Public Lighting Authority of Detroit — the agency I helped establish to address one of the most visible symbols of the city's collapse.
Forty percent of Detroit's streetlights were out. Not aging. Not flickering. Out. Entire neighborhoods dark. Under my leadership the city installed more than 65,000 LED streetlights, cut response times to downed power lines to within 20 minutes, and launched the PLANT program — a pipeline for Detroit residents to apprentice before entering the skilled trades. Over 65% of the PLA's workers reside in the city.
I am now its CEO. Fifteen years in — one of the longest-serving executives in Detroit city government.
The skills I use every day — reading rooms, understanding where power actually sits, operating in ambiguity, staying calm when the situation is not — were forged in Tajikistan and Diyala Province and Kandahar. I came home to Detroit. And I put all of it to work.
Why this book matters NOW
USAID is being dismantled as you read this.
I want to say something about that which may surprise you: I believe in the mission. The world does not get safer when we abandon the field. Development done right — infrastructure, jobs, governance, the unglamorous work of helping economies function — is among the most cost-effective tools of national security that exists.
What I do not believe in is the version I encountered. The risk-averse, report-obsessed, contractor-captured institution that had lost the thread between funding and outcome, between presence and impact, between mission and performance. That version deserved scrutiny. It still does.
Expat Confidential: An Ugly American Autopsy is the honest account of what that work looked like from inside. Not from a policy office in Washington. From a compound in Diyala Province. From a military outpost in the Arghandab Valley — the heart of Taliban country on the outskirts of Kandahar City.
This is the book I was supposed to write.
A personal Note: ADHD Journey
After returning from eight years abroad I was diagnosed with ADHD.
Not as a surprise. Looking back, the entire journey described in this book is essentially a case study. The relentless novelty-seeking. The inability to tolerate rooms that felt too small. The way I functioned best under conditions that would exhaust most people. The pattern was always there. I just didn't have language for it.
The diagnosis explained why war zones felt clarifying and conference rooms felt like suffocation. Why I needed total intensity to focus. Why the places that scared everyone else were the places I finally felt calm.
My son is navigating the same road. We are figuring it out together.
The brain that makes the ordinary world feel too small is the same brain that will make you extraordinary in the right environment. The trick is finding that environment — or building it, if it doesn't exist yet.
