Finding My Authentic Voice
How I Stopped Ghostwriting for the Corporate Machine
Getting to Substack wasn’t part of a grand strategic plan. It was more of a journey of self-discovery - and honestly, that journey is nowhere near finished.
For decades, I’ve worked in technology across global businesses. I’ve seen the Good, the Bad, and the “you have to be joking” moments. For much of that time, I worked for large consultancies where having an original opinion was... complicated.
In those environments, the corporate view is the only view. I’ve worked for companies that even monitored social media to ensure no one colored outside the lines. So, I went with the flow. I wrote articles, strategy papers, and blogs, but they were never really mine.
It was always someone else’s voice.
The Breaking Point
A couple of years ago, I parted ways with the corporate world. It gave me something I hadn’t had in years: Time. I spent months reflecting on what I actually enjoyed. I dug through my personal archives and found a mountain of “unfinished” papers, ideas I had suppressed because they didn’t fit the corporate narrative.
I started posting these thoughts on LinkedIn (shock - horror yes that “other” platform). To my surprise, people actually resonated with them. For the first time, I felt free to have an opinion without a legal team or a PR department filtering my thoughts. I wrote about lots of different topics and even became a pretty vocal advocate in the recruitment world for not using AI technology as it has/is destroying what is fundamentally a human business.
The “Cringe” Factor
I’ve always wanted to write a book. I found an old draft titled Technology Myth, Monsters, and Magic. I read it and immediately cringed. It was corny, and it needed work, but it held the spark of something real.
I’ve always been a vocal advocate for doing the right thing in business, building Tools That Respect People instead of just launching “tech-for-tech’s-sake” projects. I wanted to talk about human-centric design and how we tackle things like the UN Sustainable Development goals. Topics which were treated as buzz-words for corporate bids, something to make the project seem more than it was.
So, I sat down and wrote. What came out was The Next Evolution: Designing the Future Before it Designs Us.
This brought together a lot of my thinking and I write this book around how we should be building towards Human Agency and how we keep people at the centre of things. But I didn’t want it to be just another text so I tried to be a bit more provocative by adding “What If…?” throughout - asking challenging questions. And then providing a “How To…” which are a series of things anyone can do.
From One Book to a Nexus
Publishing that first book through Amazon KDP was a milestone. The first proof was a disaster - 300+ pages of “all over the place,” and it showed me just how little I knew about writing something this big and complicated. But after a lot of red ink, 4 proof copies later, I hit the publish button.
It was mine. It was my voice, without constraints.
That one book turned into a journey I couldn’t stop:
Book 1: Focused on human agency and keeping people at the center.
Book 2: Explored how our attention is being harvested and manipulated.
Book 3: Dove into the shadow world of cyber criminality.
Book 4 (In Progress): The Human Nexus, focusing on how we tackle the planet’s most challenging societal issues.
The Journey is Just Beginning
Finding my authentic voice has made me a more open person. I’m happy for people to agree or disagree with me - that’s how we learn. I’ve moved from being a passive observer of technology to becoming a System Shaper, I’ve found that by writing about things it’s made me do a retrospective of myself and things I needed to change.
This Substack is the next chapter of that story. It’s been a journey of ups and downs, and I hope you’ll come along for the ride.
I relate to your experiences on cooperate job. This was one of my primary reasons to join substack where no one could put me in a cage or regulate what I write