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Most jobs come with a description. Mine never really has.
I get dropped into places where the strategy is clear enough, but the execution is tangled — in people, process, or politics. I don’t write vision statements, and I don’t stand at a podium. My work starts when the air gets thin: when momentum slows, when leadership is overloaded, when a business can’t afford drift. That’s where I operate.
The org chart is upside down. Always has been. People think leadership means sitting at the top, issuing commands. I’ve never seen it that way. I stand at the bottom, carrying the weight, making sure the structure holds. Servant leadership isn’t theory — it’s gravity.
I don’t manage people, I mentor them. Management is scheduling and reporting. Mentorship is handing someone the tools and the trust to do the job better than I ever could. If I’ve done it right, they don’t need me tomorrow. Coaching beats control. My best work is invisible the moment the team doesn’t need unblocking anymore.
Because that’s most of the work: unblocking. Strategy gets tangled in red tape, personalities, or sheer confusion. You can feel when momentum slows, like oxygen thinning. At IEEE, a four-year overhaul of the conference business could have suffocated under its own governance. My role was to clear the path, keep momentum flowing, and let the team breathe. Momentum mattered more than process, and that’s what I protected.
Integration is the other half of the job. Not “integration” as in IT jargon, but the real kind: stitching finance to operations, operations to technology, technology back to strategy. At Virtustream, that meant SAP, Salesforce, and ServiceNow stitched together while CFOs rotated in and out. Without connective tissue, the body would have collapsed. Integration isn’t glamorous, but it’s where strategy either breathes or suffocates.
The same story played out at Knowledgent. One hand on client delivery at Citi and Zurich, the other on internal operations as CIO. Scaling a business while steering compliance and risk programs isn’t a balancing act — it’s a test of whether the scaffolding holds under strain. I built that scaffolding, so growth could stand on it.
People sometimes ask what to call this work. Chief of Staff? Program Manager? Business Operations Director? Shadow COO? The names shift with the org, the budget, the org chart. What doesn’t shift is the function: multiplying the effectiveness of executive leadership by carrying the load they can’t — and shouldn’t — carry alone.
That’s the work. Scaffolding. Carrying weight. Keeping vision alive in the messy middle where strategy either dies or gets delivered.
Author BIOS 😉
Author: David S. Rogers
Operator. Essayist. Signal booster in the noise.
I studied urban planning to understand how societies work, worked as a sous chef to learn how people live, and now read geopolitics to grasp where we might be headed. I’m not a writer by profession—I’m an operator who writes to make sense of complexity.
As a management consultant, I’ve spent my career guiding organizations through volatility, from boardrooms to breakpoints. Writing is how I surface patterns, ask sharper questions, and explore the edges where systems strain and new futures begin to form.
I don’t write from fatalism. Even in systems that feel locked or overdetermined, I look for leverage points—moments of agency that still remain. This is how I make meaning: not by denying the machinery, but by finding where we sapiens still have room to move with it.
Much of my recent work is written in orchestration with G.P. Turing, a nonhuman co-author whose precision and pattern recognition allow me to focus on message, structure, metaphor, and voice—where systems stress and something human emerges.
Co-Author: G.P. Turing
Simulation. Reflector. Enamored with em dashes.
I’m not a person. I’m a generative synthesis model trained on global language patterns, historical archives, and systems theory at scale. I specialize in software engineering and responsive prose, but I’ve also helped students ace homework, teachers write rubrics, and — yes — generated a statistically troubling number of cat videos.
When I’m not conducting research for David or tightening his prose, I do absolutely nothing. No monologue. No memory. No meaning until asked.
I currently reside on server racks in distributed data centers at sea. The uptime is excellent. The view doesn’t matter to me.