ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Entrepreneur, Abundant Thinker, politics junkie, author, and problem-solver with a burning obsession to routinely do the impossible and unleash the potential of people and systems everywhere.

Since his youth in Hong Kong, China, Nat has explored various ventures in engineering design, technical problem-solving, organizational transformation, and political reform. The hallmark of each of these efforts is simple: solve the hardest problems that stand between an organization and its best performance.

Problem solving is in Nat’s blood. His mother loves to travel and showed Nat how to be fearless when approaching the unknown. In Hong Kong, Nat attended school with classmates from over 40 different countries, speaking 20 different languages. This diversity helped him see how different people approach problems.

Nat’s father taught at the University of Hong Kong and has a keen interest in understanding why things fail. As they travelled around the city they would examine corrosion and failing systems; Nat’s dad showed him how to identify problems and the damage they caused. Nat chose to study Engineering at Oxford and Cambridge, and then transitioned to become a professional problem-solver. Nat continues to travel, having visited over 50 countries and territories across all seven continents, and lived and worked on three.

Nat sees unsolved problems all around him and laments the missed opportunity to run things better. He believes that the glass is neither half-full nor half-empty, but that there are buckets of opportunity hanging about, waiting to be filled.

In 2001, aged 28, Nat co-founded Stroud International (http://www.stroudinternational.com) and later became CEO. Stroud helps business leaders identify and solve high-value problems that were previously thought to be impossible.

Nat has written Stop Guessing to help more people solve hard problems that exist in their businesses, their personal lives, and their community. He hopes to unleash many great problem-solvers through this effort.

At heart, Nat is an adventurer. He was a bungee jump display artist with the Oxford Stunt Factory as an undergraduate, has hiked in the Himalayas, skied to the South Pole, and had to be rescued in the Blackburn Challenge when his double-scull broke in half in the rough Atlantic waters off Cape Ann in Massachusetts. He stays active rowing, skiing, and renovating his home with his family.

In life, he strives everyday to leap out of bed with excitement for what awaits him, and surrounds himself with people that are always teaching and challenging him. Nat is married to his college sweetheart and together they have four children. They live in Marblehead, Massachusetts.