I started in a factory in Białystok, Poland — making point-of-sale displays for Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Sony, and Philips. I was twenty, hired as a graphic designer, and promoted to lead design within months. The factory exported to more than eighty countries. I learned what clients actually wanted by asking before we built anything. That habit has not gone away.
The short version
I emigrated to Chicago in 1999. Managed art and design for six years. Spent a year inside Leo Burnett, which taught me the difference between a good idea and an idea that survives a room. Ran creative for a national B2B publisher with a staff of eleven. Then, in February 2007, I joined the American Society for Clinical Pathology as a designer.
I’m still there.
Five promotions later I lead enterprise creative for one of the largest professional societies in healthcare — brand, digital experience, events, executive communications, and the studio that produces all of it. Nineteen years in one organization is unfashionable. I’d argue it’s the only way to actually see whether the things you build hold up.
While I was doing all of that, I went back to school. In 2010 I finished a Master of Fine Arts in teaching within the creative field at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań — earned entirely while working full-time in Chicago. At the time it seemed like a detour. It turned out to be the most useful credential I have.
What I actually did
The studio I inherited was a production queue. Work arrived finished in someone else’s head, and we made it look nice.
The studio that exists now sits in the room where the decisions get made. Not because I asked nicely — because we made ourselves useful earlier and earlier in the process until it became inconvenient to leave us out. That transformation took years, and most of it was infrastructure: briefs, standards, capacity models, governance, and a great deal of patient argument.
It is the least glamorous work I’ve ever done and easily the most valuable.
On AI
I’ve spent the last two years on this — testing it, arguing about it, and watching what happens when a shiny tool meets a real team with a real deadline.
My conclusion is unglamorous. The tools are the easy part. Any competent person can be taught to use them in an afternoon. What’s hard is everything around them: deciding what’s worth automating, what isn’t, who’s accountable when it’s wrong, and how you bring an entire organization along without either terrifying them or lying to them.
That’s not a technology problem. It’s a teaching problem, a governance problem, and a change-management problem wearing a technology costume.
I’m completing Harvard’s Data Science Initiative Agentic AI Intensive this year — largely so I’m arguing from evidence rather than vibes.
The rest
I live in Katy, Texas. I lead a Chicago-headquartered team remotely and was promoted while doing it, which I mention only because people still ask whether that works.
I read more than I post. I’m suspicious of anyone who is certain about AI in either direction. I believe the most underrated skill in creative leadership is the willingness to be boring about process so that the work can be interesting.