The less formal version of the bio.

I did not exactly plan on becoming a child performer.

Nobody in my family was in show business. The story began when my elementary-school music teacher decided I might be good at performing, pulled me out of my first-grade class, and had me audition for the school talent show.

Other parents apparently saw more promise in that performance than in my youth-soccer career and began encouraging my mother to get me into show business. This was sensible advice: I was an exceptionally bad soccer player. She eventually relented.

Performing eventually took me to television, print work, Off-Broadway, Nickelodeon, and Star Search — essentially the American Idol of its day.

One of the less glamorous but more educational assignments involved demonstrating a then-new handheld karaoke machine in the New York City subway while commuters pushed past me to board their trains. It turns out that convincing a distracted stranger to care about what you are saying is a fairly good introduction to marketing.

Magic started with a disappearing drawer.

I was about six when I walked past a mall kiosk and saw a little drawer apparently made empty by magic. I was amazed.

Then I saw David Copperfield on television — leather jacket, mullet and all — making a Harley-Davidson disappear while Van Halen blasted in the background.

That was it. I was hooked.

As I got older, though, I noticed something peculiar. Performers such as Copperfield and, later, David Blaine were working very hard to make magic feel contemporary, while much of magic retailing still seemed trapped in an earlier era.

So I tried building the magic store I thought should exist.

I started a magic business aimed specifically at novices and younger magicians — customers I thought traditional dealers often failed to speak to particularly well.

Instead of modeling the marketing on niche hobby suppliers, I borrowed more from specialty fashion retail: clearer presentation, more contemporary merchandising, stronger branding, and an experience designed around the customer who wanted to enter the category rather than the expert who already knew its language.

A $500 initial investment eventually became a national business that benefited from magic's unusual invasion of popular culture in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

The business eventually extended well beyond retail. Magic & More developed corporate accounts, including chain bookstores, and became an official supplier of magicians for Harry Potter book-release events. That created an unexpectedly useful flywheel: children and parents encountered one of our performers at a bookstore event; some became retail customers; and some later hired a magician for a birthday party or other event of their own. Retail, live performance, and corporate relationships began feeding one another.

Then my product became Philadelphia.

At the City of Philadelphia, I worked in a unit focused on a problem the region was struggling with in the early and mid-2000s: brain drain.

The Philadelphia area was — and remains — home to a remarkable concentration of universities, including Penn, Temple, Villanova and many others. The problem was that large numbers of students would arrive, earn their degrees, and promptly leave for opportunities somewhere else.

My work involved helping sell Philadelphia as a place interesting enough to call home after graduation, while connecting students and recent graduates with professional opportunities and further education in the region.

Then I learned the business by having to do almost all of it.

After leaving the City, I founded CrowdConnect, a marketing and strategy agency I would go on to run for nearly 17 years. Some of its first clients were organizations I had originally worked with during my time in Philadelphia government, which gave the new agency an encouraging start.

Then those engagements ended, as engagements do, and I discovered one of entrepreneurship's less glamorous lessons: a promising beginning does not constitute a pipeline. We hit a drought. I had employees to pay, an office to keep open, and no luxury of waiting for the ideal corporate account to arrive.

So I started signing smaller businesses — restaurants, boutiques, hospitality companies, and other owner-operated organizations. At the time, it felt mostly like survival. In retrospect, it was one of the most useful stretches of my career.

A large corporate account often gives an agency responsibility for one slice of a much larger system. A small-business client could hand us nearly the whole thing. I might be working on strategy, media buying, digital, print, direct marketing, public relations, creative, promotions, and measurement for the same client. There were fewer organizational layers between an idea, its execution, and the customer's response.

By the time CrowdConnect began winning larger corporate clients again, I was considerably more battle-tested. I knew not only how to lead a creative team, but how to get a 300,000-piece direct-mail campaign out the door on schedule and on budget. I knew how to negotiate with major media outlets when the brand I represented had almost no leverage. And I had learned how to attract talented people when I was in no position to win them with market-leading compensation.

Over time, the agency moved steadily upmarket. The work expanded into strategy, customer experience, analytics, growth, and increasingly complex organizational problems, eventually including Fortune 1000 clients. At its peak, CrowdConnect operated from offices in Philadelphia, Moorestown, and Princeton.

Running the agency also meant that strategy and execution could never remain comfortably separate. I had to win the work, scope it, price it, staff it, deliver it, preserve the relationship, manage the economics, and build an organization capable of doing all of that again.

The corporate world made the system larger still.

After years of entrepreneurship and consulting, my work moved deeper inside larger organizations, expanding further into marketing, growth, customer strategy, loyalty, analytics, brand, technology, and organizational transformation. The scale changed: larger data sets, larger budgets, larger teams — and usually larger gaps between what an organization intended to do and what its systems actually allowed people to do.

The subject matter changed, but the questions were familiar: How do people make decisions? Which customers should we understand differently? What incentives are shaping behavior? Why does an apparently sensible strategy produce a decidedly less sensible result once an organization tries to execute it?

Practice eventually sent me back to the classroom.

Graduate business education gave me a more formal vocabulary for many of the questions I had already encountered in practice: strategy, organizations, economics, innovation, negotiation, and the difficult business of turning evidence into decisions.

It also pushed me toward research itself. Increasingly, I became interested not merely in knowing which managerial tools organizations use, but in asking where those tools came from, why they persist, what evidence actually supports them, and what happens when practice and theory disagree.

Research and practice increasingly talk to each other.

Today I move between applied business questions, research, writing, and organizational problems. I am especially interested in places where a familiar managerial assumption becomes less convincing once we examine the evidence, incentives, power relationships, or people living with the consequences.