Mindtap Portal

My career started with nearly two decades in corporate innovation — engineer, product designer, insights leader, and founder — across top global consumer goods and pharma companies including Procter & Gamble, Pfizer, and GSK. For a long time, I thought capability was the whole game. I was getting great performance reviews. Solving hard problems. Trusted with the work. And still not advancing the way the work suggested I should. But the real shift came when I stopped asking "what's wrong with how they see me?" and started asking "how does this actually work?" Because being excellent and being seen as a leader are not the same thing. Capability builds trust. Influence shapes what happens next. And nobody had ever taught me the difference. So I learned it — how decisions get made, how influence moves, how ideas gain traction. I built a methodology out of it, grounded in applied neuroscience and the innovation processes I'd spent a career using. That's the work I do now as the Leadership Translator: helping high-performing professionals turn expertise into influence and difference into advantage — without becoming someone they're not.