This boutique multinational firm is now two decades old. As its main value proposition, it has always offered early- to mid-career participants the opportunity to “grow their own” project know-how by reflecting on their own experience and ideals, with me as a partner. Thus, Cogent Language is not only the name of this company. It also names a main service I try to provide to each participant, as well as a skill that most improve by partnering with us. 

So, here, let me introduce myself as your potential partner. (You can check out a more business-like intro on my LinkedIn profile).

I  grew up in the US state of Arizona in the 1950’s, outside of Phoenix. There and then, white folks, like my family, were moving into new subdivisions bordering older Hispanic neighborhoods. As a boy, I played in big farm fields the Hoover Dam had begun to water, worked mostly by temporary laborers from Mexico under the US/Mexixo Bracero Program. A little further away, I could walk among cottonwood trees, mountains, desert, and, way far away, reservations of indigenous Apache, Hopi, and Navaho. This is where my deep appreciation for other cultures, ecosystems, and sentient beings took root.  

When I was twelve, my family moved to California, down the peninsula from San Francisco, into the then very diverse 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, ecotopians, the Black Panthers, and entrepreneurs of all stripes.

After graduating Stanford 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, in the 1990`s, I had experience working with government, university, and private sector organizations in Silicon Valley, Boston, and Tokyo. 

Then, for about 10 years, I served as a senior consultant to a Fortune Five firm, leading the design of instructional systems in more than a dozen countries. These included Japan, China, Thailand, France, Italy, Norway, Russia, Angola, Chad, and the US. In 2004, I was invited by the US Department of Defense and by the University of Maryland (UMD) Center for Advanced Study of Language (CASL) to give advice on US training in language and intercultural education for the the 21st Century.

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 in project know-how to groups of managers and to individuals.  

While demand for these corporate services has continued, in the last few years, I have become 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 coaching and career education enabling individuals to start where they are and to grow their own project management practice, fit to their realities and to their ideals. In 2025, I was recognized as an “Exceptional Mentor” by the US Project Management Institute (PMI) of Phoenix Arizona, where I had the great good fortune to have grown  up.