Engineer. Black Belt. Slowmad.

I started as a chemical engineer. Engineering teaches you a useful humility early: a process responds to how it was set up, not to how much anyone wanted it to work. Later, in manufacturing and BPO, I watched the same law apply to people’s work. Teams were rarely the problem. They were trying hard inside designs nobody had questioned. Fix the design, and the same people suddenly looked brilliant.

Years later I was a broke MBA student in Murcia, Spain, learning to stretch a euro and to see business from the outside. Then came regional programmes with international NGOs across India, Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia, often leading multicultural teams where “done” could mean four different things. That’s where I learned that a process has to make sense to someone who wasn’t in the meeting.

At some point I turned the method on myself. I moved from nomad to slowmad: longer stays, focused work blocks, fewer flights. My work had to keep running from Warsaw, from a coworking desk in Cebu, from wherever the week took me. So I built it that way: clear priorities, simple systems, nothing that only works while I’m watching. It’s the same design brief I now bring to every team.