I grew up in the US Southwest of the 1950’s, on the outskirts of a suburb of Phoenix Arizona. At the time, white folks, like my family, were moving into that suburb. It bordered older Hispanic neighborhoods on one side and big farm fields on the other. As a boy, I played in those fields, ones the Hoover Dam had just begun to water. Those fields were worked mostly by my Hispanic neighbors and by temporary laborers from Mexico under the US/Mexico Bracero Program. Around those fields, I could play among cottonwood trees, mountains, the desert, and very far away, the reservations of indigenous Apaches, Hopi, and Navaho.

When I was twelve, my family moved to California, down the peninsula from San Francisco, into the then very diverse middle class town of Mountain View. I came of age there, a neighbor of Steve Jobs, in the heart of what would soon become “Silicon Valley”. We were both lucky enough to grow up around jazzy beatniks, systems engineers, zen beginners, hippies, hackers, eco-topians, the Black Panthers, and entrepreneurs of all stripes.

I got into Stanford University on scholarships. After graduating Phi Beta Kappa, I began to work in intercultural education and training. In some of the top organizations of that new field, I was fortunate enough to land key roles as a young man, doing, at the same time, graduate work in Cybernetic Systems and in Education. By mid-career, having worked in Silicon Valley, Tokyo, and Boston, I was leading the design of instructional systems in more than a dozen countries, including some in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas.

In 2004, I was invited by the US Department of Defense and The University of Maryland (UMD) Center for Advanced Study of Language (CASL) to present on the post-9/11 future of US training in languages and intercultural education. 

In 2005, I launched this company, Cogent Language, as a US limited liability company (LLC) under Arizona law.  There and then, my main clients were US and Asia Pacific multinational firms. My only offering was pure consulting on global business communication and human resource development.

After a series of successful engagements in Japan, I opened a branch of Cogent Language in Tokyo in 2007 and began working there steadily with Japanese and global companies. While my main stock in trade continued to be advice to decision-makers on human resource development, I also began providing training to employees and coaching to managers on project management.  

While demand for these corporate services continued, during the Covid pandemic, I became less interested in working through managers, HR administrators, executives, and lawyers, amd more interested in serving individuals directly, as a coach or mentor.  Thus, the current line of Cogent Language business is mentoring – , enabling individuals to start where they are and to grow their own project management practice and their careers, fit to their realities and their ideals.

In 2025, I was recognized as an “Exceptional Mentor” by the US Project Management Institute (PMI) of Phoenix Arizona. Which is where I founded my company 20 years ago. And where I used to play, as a glad young boy, one sentient being, among infinite fields, abuzz with infinite others.