As a principal with FMI’s Center for Strategic Leadership, Michael brings his 35+ years of experience in the construction industry to bear on the challenges confronting today’s leaders. He is particularly passionate about helping drive organizational change through strategic thought and personal transformation.

Michael is a lifelong construction guy, having been born into a family construction business in Raleigh, N.C. Sunday afternoons were spent touring jobsites and playing on big tractors. Summers meant working at asphalt plants, laying pipe, and finishing concrete. He continued this industry involvement post-college, assuming various leadership roles including president & CEO. Engineering News-Record named him one of its 21st century leaders of the transportation industry. Still other business interests exposed him to related industries like commercial and residential development, midstream oil and gas, mobile heavy equipment telematics, and golf course design / construction / management.

He has been heavily involved in corporate governance, having spoken at National Association of Corporate Director events and been instrumental in the organization and launch of two independent, outside board of directors. Michael is also a past chairman of the National Asphalt Pavement Association (2000) and led a segment of its worker health and safety initiative dealing with asphalt fumes for more than a decade. During those years, he developed close working relationships with members of organized labor, regulatory agencies and academia – in both the U.S. and Europe.

Michael earned a civil engineering (construction) degree from North Carolina State University, continuing with post-graduate studies at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. He has lectured in the graduate schools at both UNC and Northwestern University and is a 20+ year member of the Young Presidents Organization (“YPO”). As such, Michael has been fortunate to count some of the most outstanding business leaders in the world as his teachers.