Advisory & Consulting

The Work

I have spent twenty-five years being called into rooms where the ordinary tools have stopped working.

The engagements vary. I have advised university presidents navigating the transfer of institutional power — the particular psychology of succession, where the incoming leader must establish authority without dismantling the loyalties that held the institution together under the predecessor, and where the unconscious dynamics of that transition will determine, more than any strategic plan, whether the institution thrives or fractures. I have been brought in when major institutions faced allegations of sexual misconduct and needed someone who could read the human dynamics beneath the legal and reputational crisis — someone who understood that what was happening in the room between the attorneys and the board and the accusers and the accused was not primarily a legal problem but a psychological one, and that the outcome would depend on whether anyone in the room could see that clearly.

I have worked with trading desks at major banks, where the personality structures that make certain traders extraordinarily profitable are the same structures that make them dangerous — and where the ability to read that arrangement accurately is worth more than most risk models. More broadly, I have been called in to work with senior managers across financial institutions and major industries whose personality organizations were shaping the decisions of entire divisions — not through malice or incompetence, but through the invisible logic of how they were built.

A leader whose anxiety manifests as control will produce a controlled division.

A leader whose narcissism is unregulated will produce a compliant team that has stopped thinking independently. These are not management problems. They are personality, expressed as organizational structure. Reading them accurately — and intervening before the cost becomes irreversible — has preserved divisions, careers, and in some cases, institutions. That is not coaching. That is applied psychoanalysis at the level where the stakes are measured in hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of livelihoods.

I have consulted with schools navigating the volatile intersection of major donor relationships and institutional governance, where the personalities in the room carry more weight than the policies on the page — and where the capacity to negotiate between difficult personality structures without alienating any of them is the difference between a funded institution and a fractured one.

During the worst months of COVID in New York, when the medical system was breaking and the people inside it were breaking with it, I was called in to help keep clinicians functional — not through therapy, but through applied understanding of what happens to human beings under sustained extremity.

I enlisted writers from Cartoon Network to run improv sessions with nurses and physicians, because I understood that what those people needed was not debriefing but reconnection to the part of themselves that could still play.

That is a psychoanalytic intervention, whether or not anyone in the room would have called it that.

I was brought into war-torn Ethiopia to help train physicians at a medical school where the infrastructure had collapsed and the psychological toll on the faculty was as acute as the material deprivation. In the years following perestroika, I consulted with former KGB agents in Siberia to establish Western-style educational infrastructure — schooling for both adults and children in a region where the collapse of the Soviet system had left an institutional vacuum and the people tasked with filling it were trained in surveillance, not pedagogy. The psychological complexity of that work — sitting across from men whose entire professional identity had been organized around state control, and helping them construct something built on openness — was among the most demanding and instructive of my career. It taught me something I have relied on ever since: that the capacity for transformation exists in people and systems that appear, from the outside, to be the least likely to change. You just have to know how to read what is actually available beneath what is being presented.

Over the past two years, I have consulted with both Palestinians and Israelis to locate mental health resources during active trauma — work that requires holding irreconcilable realities without collapsing into the false comfort of choosing a side.

The common thread is not a specialty area. It is a way of seeing. In every one of these situations, the presenting problem was not the actual problem. The trading floor risk was a personality structure, not a market condition. The COVID breakdown was not burnout — it was the collapse of the psychological infrastructure that allows human beings to function under threat. The division that was hemorrhaging talent was not suffering from a strategy failure — it was reflecting, with perfect fidelity, the internal organization of the person running it.

Whether I am sitting with a head of state or a head of department, with a patient in my consulting room or a board in a crisis — the discipline is the same. I read how people are organized. I see what the room cannot see about itself.