Me in 10 seconds?
I’m a husband, a dad, a builder, a Purple Heart recipient, and somebody who has spent twenty-something years doing the work of getting new technology to pay off inside the organizations who bought it.
I run the strategy and modernization practice at The Select Group. I live in Raleigh, North Carolina, with my wife Jenelle and our son Ford.
What am I doing now? Check out my now page.
The long version
Hi, I’m Adam.
This is where I write in the margins of the work I do every day. Mostly about AI and robotics inside real enterprises these days, the structural reasons most modernization programs don’t deliver what they promise, and the few patterns that work despite that. Plus the personal stuff that comes along for the ride: fatherhood, running, the foundation I run with my wife, what I’m figuring out as I go.
What I’m chasing
Most companies are perfectly capable of buying new technology and perfectly incapable of putting it to work. The gap between “we just deployed AI” and “AI is doing useful things for our customers” is wider than most CxO’s are willing to admit. The bottleneck is almost never the technology. It’s the change capacity of the organization receiving it, and the people who are needed to operationalize it.
I’ve been on both sides of that gap as an executive and as a consultant. I write about closing it.
The through-line
The shape of the work, compressed: I started a couple of businesses as a teenager, enlisted in the Army, and built the rest of a career around figuring out how to put something new into production inside organizations that weren’t built for it. That thread runs from engineering at VeriSign to brand-building at Under Armour ($10M to $50M+ on Mil/Tac), from digital transformation work at Accenture and Laureate (86 universities, 75% cycle reduction) to six years building partner ecosystems at Scaled Agile ($20M+ in annualized revenue). SAFe Fellow since 2021. A book in 2023. A couple of podcasts, including Business Agility Now (top 5% on Spotify and Apple). Keynotes when invited. One side bet on bike manufacturing (Valor Cycles) that didn’t work out but taught me a lot about rapid prototyping. Joined TSG in early 2026.
Iraq is in there too, between the early businesses and the engineering work. On December 8, 2005, 1LT Kevin J. Smith was killed protecting me and others in our convoy from a targeted attack outside Baghdad. Medical retirement, Purple Heart, a life I wouldn’t have without him.
The Most Important Stuff
Jenelle has been alongside through many of the chapters above, including the ones where I needed to be reminded I was still a fun and silly person. Ford showed up in February 2025 and reorganized me in the most beautiful ways possible. The Mattis Foundation, which Jenelle and I started in 2024, runs the Kevin J. Smith Memorial Scholarship, and takes care of the community where it can. Leading my family and team in that is what I would continue if all other work stopped.
I run trails most days and lift heavy a couple times a week. When I can get there, I take my Porsche 911 to Virginia International Raceway. Before that it was motocross, for years. Anything that punishes you for not paying attention has always been the cleanest way I’ve found to clear my head. At 43 I’m steadier than I’ve ever been.
Why subscribe?
Subscribe for first-person notes from inside the work of getting new technology into real production. Expect a mix of pattern-recognition from the org chart, the occasional military-perspective aside, and the personal stuff that comes with being a husband, a dad, and a guy with a few miles on him.
