Leaders in Conversation — Fireside Chat
Real conversations with GIS leaders — about what nobody warned them about.
What Fireside Chat Is
Fireside chat is a monthly conversation series I host with GIS leaders who have lived the leadership work — not just theorized about it.
We do not talk about tools. We do not talk about certifications. We do not talk about frameworks in the abstract.
We talk about what it was actually like to lead a GIS program. To fight for a budget. To navigate a reorganization. To manage a team through change you did not choose. To sit in a room where nobody spoke your language and figure out how to be heard anyway.
Each episode is a real conversation. Recorded live. Unedited. Guided by the same principle as my book — that the honest version of leadership is the version worth teaching.
If you are a GIS professional carrying one of these questions right now, these conversations were made for you.
The Consultant's View — What Really Breaks GIS Programs
Two of the most respected consultants in the GIS field sit down to talk about the pattern they see repeating in organization after organization — and why the technical work is almost never the problem.
Leading Through the Transition — When Your Role Is Being Rewritten
A candid conversation about what it looks like to lead a GIS program when the technology, the organization, and your own role are all changing at the same time.
Would They Give You the Last $10,000?
Recorded live at the Esri User Conference in San Diego. Two GIS leaders with a combined 60+ years of navigating organizational politics in government talk about executive support, budget defense, and the elevator pitch that changed everything.
Why I Started Fireside Chat
The book is one part of the answer. The community is another. Fireside chat is the third.
Because leadership is not something you learn from a chapter or a course. It is something you absorb from being close to people who have been through it. The conversations that mattered most in my own career were not the ones in classrooms. They were the ones over coffee. In hallways. On the phone at 9 PM after a meeting that did not go the way I hoped.
Fireside chat is that conversation, made public.
Every guest is someone I have learned from personally. Every episode is a conversation I would want to have on a hard day. And every one is designed for the GIS leader who is doing the work now — not the one who has already made it through.
