THE EXPERIENCE BEHIND THE PERSPECTIVE

Growth looks different when you've been accountable for delivering it.

GrowthSight's perspective was shaped from inside the enterprise. It reflects more than three decades spent operating inside corporations—and more than two decades personally creating, launching and scaling new growth. Alan's career provides the context for how he approaches the growth challenges executives face today.

From corporate operator to growth executive

Alan began his career after earning a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, spending his first decade in engineering, operations, product development and acquisition-related leadership.

Those formative years grounded him in the realities of corporate leadership: delivering operating results, managing capital, navigating competing priorities, leading through change, and understanding how organizational culture can accelerate progress—or quietly stop it.

Around 2000, Alan helped develop and launch a new consumer product in partnership with Johnson & Johnson. The product became a significant market success, helping create an entirely new category and disrupt an established market. The experience changed the trajectory of his career and began what would become more than two decades focused on creating new growth.

Learning innovation by doing it

Alan's transition into innovation leadership coincided with a formative period for the discipline, as design thinking, open innovation, disruptive innovation and, later, lean startup and agile development reshaped how companies pursued new growth. Alan experienced that evolution from an unusual position: he wasn't a consultant introducing these ideas to corporations; he was the corporate executive responsible for making them work.

Over the following two decades, Alan worked with and learned alongside many of the pioneers behind these approaches while building innovation organizations, leading global and cross-functional teams, managing significant investment portfolios, developing patented innovations, and bringing new products, services and businesses to market. He saw firsthand what worked, what didn't, and what needed to be adapted to produce results inside complex organizations.

Many of those relationships have continued for decades. Today, innovation and design firms occasionally invite Alan to provide the corporate insider's perspective—critiquing work, advising on client challenges, and helping translate innovative thinking into approaches that can succeed inside large organizations.

From innovation to enterprise growth

As Alan's responsibilities grew, so did the scale of the growth challenge. The mandate evolved from launching successful innovations to creating enough new growth to matter to a multibillion-dollar enterprise. That required moving beyond innovation methodology to integrate venture building, portfolio management, capital allocation and market-based experimentation.

Alan's responsibilities progressed from launching individual products to building portfolios, creating services and new business models, launching ventures and marketplaces, and ultimately building enterprise growth systems. With that progression came responsibility for shaping corporate strategy, governing significant investment portfolios, and pursuing opportunities ranging from $100 million product platforms to billion-dollar ventures and multibillion-dollar portfolios of new growth.

That experience is central to the perspective Alan brings to other executives: understanding not only innovation, but the corporation in which innovation has to succeed—the competing demands of long-term growth and near-term performance, entrepreneurial experimentation and enterprise capital allocation, and ambitious growth objectives and corporate realities.

The path to GrowthSight

By the time Alan completed his most recent corporate chapter, he had spent decades building and leading innovation and growth capabilities across multiple organizations. His expectation was straightforward: find the next organization where he could do it again.

He did not set out to become a consultant.

Instead, executives in Alan's network began reaching out for help with many of the same growth challenges he had spent his career navigating: identifying opportunities large enough to matter, making better investment decisions under uncertainty, turning innovation activity into measurable results, building and managing growth portfolios, and helping promising ventures navigate the corporation and scale.

GrowthSight grew from those conversations and a simple realization: Alan could have greater impact applying what he had learned across multiple organizations rather than building the capability one company at a time.

Today, Alan works directly with executives and executive teams as an advisor, thought partner, coach and fractional growth leader—bringing the perspective of a career corporate executive who has spent decades doing the work from the inside.

Professional Background

Alan holds a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology and is a named inventor on multiple U.S. and international patents. He has shared his experience at industry forums and executive roundtables, served as a keynote speaker at U.S. and global leadership events, and presented as a subject-matter expert and guest faculty at innovation conferences.