Clarity. Alignment. Momentum In that order, for a reason.
I help high-performing people and teams stop performing long enough to tell the truth, hear themselves clearly, and move with power.
- NIKE
- Airbnb
- Dropbox
- Faire
- Vercel
- Yonex
- Prosper Portland
- Historic Parkrose
For leaders, creatives, founders, and teams who have succeeded by adapting and are ready to lead from what they stopped showing.
The bottleneck is almost never capability.
Teams full of brilliant people stall constantly. Strategies written by smart people die in decks constantly. And when you trace the failure back, it's rarely a skills gap or a market problem. It's a truth that someone decided not to say, fourteen months before the consequences arrived. A priority nobody would kill. A leadership team that has been "aligned" in every meeting and agreed on nothing.
Most consultants address this with frameworks. Frameworks are useful. But a framework has never once sat in the room while a leadership team admitted, out loud, what's actually in the way.
That conversation is the work. The strategy gets easy after it.
Tell the truth sooner
I coach people. I coach teams.
I coach businesses and strategies.
The altitude changes; the questions don't.
Leadership Coaching
For leaders at every altitude: executives, emerging leaders, and people in the middle of a transformation that doesn't fit on an org chart. The creatives. The culturalists. The sensitive ones whose emotional intuition got labeled "too much" somewhere on the way up.
Maybe you're a storyteller who wants to bring it into business. Maybe you're a businessperson who needs to find the story. Either way, the intuition, the creativity, the culture you carry aren't what you outgrew. They're the superpowers your next chapter runs on.
Not performance coaching. Not executive polish. A return to the part of you that already knows.
Strategic Advisory & Fractional Leadership
For organizations that need the Nike operator: DTC and digital growth, international expansion, operating models, cross-functional alignment at scale. I've aligned hundreds of people around ambiguous problems and built the operating systems that turn vision into something a Tuesday can execute.
The advisory work looks like consulting. It behaves like coaching.
Strategic Facilitation & Cohorts
Leadership teams, boards, offsites, cohorts. The rooms where everyone says "we've been talking about this for months and nothing is happening." My job is to ask what's actually happening, help people tell the truth about it, and convert the truth into decisions and the decisions into motion.
Safe enough to be honest. Challenged enough to change.
You learned to become what the world rewarded. Then you kept going.
The people I coach are not broken. They're the opposite. Good workers, then good managers, then good leaders. They succeeded by becoming exactly what every room needed, and to do it, they turned things off. The creativity. The emotional intuition. The culture they carry.
The work is not just strategy. It's the moment someone finally says what they've been managing, masking, or rehearsing for years. And the things you turned off are the things that deliver what comes next: the intuition that reads a room before the data arrives, the creativity that finds the door no framework shows you, the culture that builds trust across every kind of difference.
Plenty of people scaled big businesses. Plenty of coaches sell clarity. Very few have mastered performance in the biggest rooms in the world and can tell you, precisely, what it costs to lose yourself there. That's not my pitch. That's my story.
The things you turned off are the things your next chapter runs on.
Clarity
On identity, purpose, strategy, priorities, the decision you've been circling.
Alignment
Of values, teams, operating models, and the trust that makes all three real instead of laminated.
Momentum
Execution, accountability, systems, change that survives contact with the calendar.
Most organizations think they have a momentum problem. Almost all of them have a clarity problem wearing a momentum costume.
Strategist. Operator.
Coach. Community builder.
The order has changed over the years; the ingredients haven't.
I spent 12 years at Nike leading global digital experiences, international expansion, and ecommerce. Big teams, big numbers, big rooms. Before that: an MBA, a systems brain, and a childhood as a Korean-American kid in Texas where I learned excellence, adaptability, and hard work as survival skills before I knew they'd become a career.
I got very good at creating clarity from chaos, making hard calls, and turning vision into execution. I was good at it the way a lot of people are good at things: completely, and at a cost I didn't itemize until later.
The second half of my journey has been about that cost. Learning that the most powerful leadership isn't control, perfection, or image. It's congruence: this is who I am, this is what I believe, this is what I will create. I built this practice for people and organizations doing that same work, because I know exactly what it feels like to live behind competence.
The operator builds the machine. The coach understands the humans inside it. You're hiring both.
Don't take my word for it.
"Gene has a unique gift for connecting with people. He created a safe space where I could open up completely, free from judgment. This coaching journey was truly life-changing. His guidance helped me unlock a new level of self-understanding and confidence."
"Gene has a great skill of meeting you where you are and helping to catalyze the next steps on your journey. He prepared thoughtfully for our sessions, drawing from a wide range of tools, ideas, frameworks, and books. I'd recommend him to anyone feeling stuck or looking to align their lives with their authentic selves."
"Gene's approach is personal and intentional. He creates space for reflection and asks thoughtful questions, helping you tap into your core values so you can move toward them. You'll leave with tools and strategies, and the confidence to use them in a way that's personal to your values and strengths."
Stories from the pressure cooker.
Keynotes, panels, workshops, and fireside chats. Each talk customized to your audience.
More Like Me
A Korean Texan Oregonian identity, a lack of representation and role models, and what it costs to grow in the corporate world by fitting in.
Global by Design
Building Nike's digital experiences with culture and language in mind. From FuelBand to a $12B ecommerce business across 55+ markets.
Monochrome to Punk Rock
How helping people find their voices unlocks business results and innovation. The case for congruence as a growth strategy.
We start with a conversation.
Free, unstructured, no deck. You tell me what's true right now. I'll tell you what I'm hearing, including the parts you didn't say. You'll know quickly whether my directness is the useful kind.
From there, the engagement takes whatever shape the problem actually has: a coaching arc, an advisory retainer, a facilitated offsite, or some combination. I keep a small roster on purpose. The attention is total, which is the whole point of premium.
Each quarter, I reserve spots for sliding scale and pro bono partnerships, with priority for leaders and organizations from historically underrepresented communities.
Book the conversation