About Mike Ross
I am a writer, a systems theorist, and a technologist. For most of my career I built and repaired large systems. Eventually I became just as interested in the systems people live inside and the ones they carry inside themselves.
The systems I built
I spent twenty years inside some of the most demanding technology environments there are. At Amazon I was a Principal Technical Program Manager in a 3,000-person, $1.4B technology organization, running delivery for the global hiring platform across 20+ engineering teams and 66 countries, and before that I led the program organization for Amazon Care. At Microsoft I was the client CTO and senior technology advisor to the largest for-profit healthcare system in the United States. I have been a CTO three times, including at a telehealth company during COVID, and I founded and ran my own consulting firm.
That work was mostly about one question: why does a system produce the outcome it produces, instead of the one everybody says it should? The answer was almost never the technology. It was the mechanisms, the incentives, and the assumptions nobody had written down.
The same instinct, pointed somewhere else
The writing comes from the same place. I ask the same questions of a belief system, a healing practice, a family, or a nervous system that I used to ask of a delivery organization:
- What is actually happening?
- What mechanism produces the outcome?
- What assumptions are we treating as facts?
- Who does the system work for, and who does it fail?
- What does it cost?
- Why do we keep it when it does not work?
Where the work lives
The Reach is the book I am writing, about what happens when survival strategies become identity and achievement becomes a source of safety. Attachment in Motion is the umbrella model underneath much of the human systems work. The essays are where I work those ideas out, and speaking is where I test them in a room.
I still do technology work. The thinking is on the Technology page, and I take on a limited number of consulting engagements. Get in touch if your organization needs that.
Based in Nashville, Tennessee.
Earlier writing appeared under the name Ross Charles. I now publish as Mike Ross.