Integrate and Innovate: Lessons from a Career of Mergers

Across two decades leading technology through some of the biggest mergers in their industries, I kept facing the same choice. The easy version of the job was always simple: just integrate. Merge the companies, consolidate the systems, declare victory. I learned — first at Aon, then over nearly eight years at Cushman & Wakefield — to choose the harder version instead: to innovate while integrating. That choice is the reason those organizations are positioned the way they are today.

Take my time at Cushman & Wakefield, where I served as Global CIO and Chief Digital Officer for nearly eight years. People ask me what those years were "really" like, usually expecting a story about technology. The technology mattered, but the real story is about the choices we made at each inflection point. There were a lot of them: going private, buying Cassidy Turley, acquiring Cushman & Wakefield and taking its name, then going public. At every one of those moments, the safe move was to keep our heads down and just integrate. We refused to do only that. We integrated and we built — and had we made the easier choices, the opportunity in front of the company today would be far smaller.

The Easy Task Was Just Integration

I joined DTZ when it was still finding its footing, and then the pace of change accelerated fast. First the company went private — new ownership, a mandate to grow. Then we bought Cassidy Turley. And then we did something audacious: we acquired Cushman & Wakefield, a firm far better known than we were, and took its iconic, century-old name as our own. What looked like one company on the outside was, on the inside, three of them stitched together in quick succession: a patchwork of overlapping platforms, redundant infrastructure, and teams that had grown up speaking different technical languages.

Pulling that together into one functioning organization was a genuine undertaking, and plenty of leaders would have stopped there. Integration alone would have been a respectable answer. But integration alone is a defensive posture — it gets you back to where you were, just with fewer systems. I didn't want to spend the rare leverage of a merger simply consolidating. A merger is one of the few moments when an organization will actually accept change. Wasting that moment on pure cleanup would have been the real failure.

I'd seen this play out before. Earlier in my career, as a technology leader at Aon, I lived through the same kind of choices — first when we brought in Benfield, then a couple of years later with the much larger acquisition of Hewitt Associates, which became Aon Hewitt. Each one posed the identical question: do you just merge the systems and move on, or do you treat the disruption as a chance to build something better than either company had before? Those experiences taught me that the integration is never really the point. The point is what you choose to build while everyone is already braced for change. I carried that lesson straight into the work that followed.

The 360 that set the tone

One of the first real decisions I made after the Cassidy Turley merger was to run a 360-degree review across the top layers of the technology organization. Not as a performance exercise — as a mapping exercise. I needed to know who carried the institutional knowledge, who could lead change, and where the skill actually lived, regardless of which legacy company's badge someone happened to wear. The people you identify in that moment are the ones who carry the transformation. Get that read wrong and nothing downstream works.

Buy and Partner, Don't Build for the Sake of Building

I had a strong conviction that a real estate services firm has no business pretending to be a custom software shop. My strategy rested on what I described at the time as a stool with three legs: people, platforms, and partnerships. The instinct people expect from a real estate CIO is to build proprietary technology. Mine was the opposite — partner where I could, integrate proven platforms, and reserve our energy for the work only we could do.

That discipline had to be enforced, because the temptation never stops. In the years I was there, spending on commercial real estate technology exploded, and the vendor pitches followed. I'd count five in my inbox before lunch. So I kept a one-page, laminated strategic framework on my desk, and if a new technology couldn't map to it, the conversation ended there. As I used to put it, you can't keep chasing the shiny red ball just because you work in technology.

The point of all of it was the same: stay asset-light, stay aligned to the business, and never let technology spend drift away from a problem someone in the business actually owned.

Private, Then Public Again

For most of the integration work, we operated as a privately held company — which gave us room to do the hard, unglamorous consolidation without a quarterly audience. Then, in August 2018, we took the company public, listing on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker CWK. That reframed every technology conversation I had. Suddenly the question wasn't just "does this work?" but "can we explain this, defend it, and depend on it under public scrutiny?" Discipline stops being a virtue you aspire to and becomes a requirement you operate under.

I won't pretend it was smooth the whole way. It wasn't. We had stretches that tested the team and tested me. But we kept landing on solid ground, and the recognition that came along the way — being named to CIO Magazine's CIO100 more than once — mattered less to me than the fact that the organization could absorb pressure and keep delivering.

I was part of the core team that took the company public, and that's an experience few technology executives get. An IPO is not a finance event that the rest of the company watches from the sidelines; it's an all-hands stress test of whether your systems, your controls, and your data can stand up to the scrutiny of public markets. Being in that room — helping carry the firm across that threshold rather than just supporting it — changed how I think about readiness, accountability, and what "good enough" actually means when real money and real reputations are on the line.

We Were Building the Runway for Something We Couldn't Fully See Yet

I want to be honest about what we were and weren't building. When we made our platform bets, we were building for automation — robotic process automation, chatbots, self-service, the workflow intelligence that takes friction out of a business. We were not sitting in 2017 designing for agentic AI; almost no one was. The large-scale generative and agentic systems that dominate the conversation now weren't on the table the way they are today.

But here's what matters: the choices we made to innovate while integrating — the cloud-first platform, the disciplined data and analytics work, the refusal to settle for bare consolidation — built a foundation that turned out to be exactly what an AI-capable organization needs. We built the runway. Had we made very different choices — had we just integrated — the opportunity available to the company today would be far lower. You can't bolt intelligence onto a fragmented, undisciplined data estate. We didn't know precisely what we were enabling, but we built it well enough that it enabled what came next.

The Real Measure: The People Are Still Leading

The other half of "innovate while you integrate" was people. I invested as heavily in talent development and engagement as I did in any platform, because I believed the technology would only ever be as good as the team running it. We created tiers of leadership, brought people into research and innovation work, put leaders through real development, and gave them room to initiate, build, and own outcomes rather than just keep the lights on.

The proof is who's running things now. When I retired, my responsibilities passed to interim co-CIOs Sal Companieh and Oliver Skagerlind — people I had worked alongside and helped develop for years. The senior technology leaders steering the company today were the leaders we were developing during my tenure. That's not a coincidence; it was the plan.

My appreciation for the people side of the business got a lot deeper when I stepped in as interim Chief People Officer. I came in thinking I understood the HR function. I didn't — not really. Sitting in that seat, I saw up close how much careful, often invisible work goes into building culture, navigating a global workforce, and holding an organization together through constant change. It gave me an entirely new respect for the chief HR officer who had done the role before me and for the entire people organization. They had been carrying weight I'd only half-noticed from the technology side. You don't fully value that work until you've had to do it yourself.

Most executives never get to experience any of that — building a team that outlasts them, or stepping outside their own discipline to understand what their colleagues actually carry. You spend a career building things, and the honest test of whether you built them well — the platform and the people both — is whether they keep working, and keep growing, after you walk out the door. Mine did.

Why This Matters to How I Work Now

I lead a real estate practice in Austin now, and clients sometimes wonder what a global CIO role has to do with buying or selling a home. More than you'd think. Commercial real estate was my world for nearly a decade. I learned to do the disciplined work and take the ambitious swing at the same time — to integrate the boring fundamentals while still building toward where things are going. That's exactly the posture a client's biggest financial decision deserves: rigor on the details, and an eye on the opportunity most people miss.