About Me
Most people are trained to see the system or the people inside it. My work lives in the distance between the two.
I spent fifteen years as a lawyer. Most of that career was in Hollywood, where I worked for nearly a decade as an entertainment lawyer with credits across the James Bond franchise. Before that, I worked at the United Nations, in government, and in corporate practice.
My career put me inside more varied institutions than most people see in a lifetime. Private practice, public sector, international tribunals, government, the entertainment industry. Different rules, different power structures, different relationships to legitimacy. The same pattern showed up everywhere: a gap between what an institution promised the people inside it and what those people actually experienced. In some places, the gap was small enough to live with. In others, it had become structural, and the organization was paying for it whether or not it had named the cost.
I call this distance the Legitimacy Gap, and I think it’s the central problem facing organizations now. It quietly decides who stays, the capabilities of its leaders, and whether the next generation can become the people organizations need for stewardship of growth, succession, and knowledge transfer.
