About the Author
The Early Years
Ken was raised in rural Dufur, a small farming town in north-central Oregon with a population hovering around five hundred. The town’s streets told their own story: east–west roads neatly paved, north–south streets still gravel. Its motto—“Ask not what Dufur can do for you, but what you can do for Dufur”—was a way of life.
Those early years were not easy. Ken’s mother raised four children on her own, well below the poverty line, relying at times on government assistance to put food on the table. What they lacked in money, however, was more than offset by love, independence, and an unspoken expectation to persevere.
Dufur Schools housed kindergarten through eighth grade on one side of the building, with the high school on the other. In a school small enough to know everyone, yet demanding enough to shape minds and character, Ken and his siblings learned discipline, self-reliance, and the value of education. All graduated as valedictorians and went on to college, carrying with them the quiet confidence of kids who learned early how to stand on their own.
The Pursuit of Knowledge
Ken began programming in 1979 at Dufur High School on a teacher’s Radio Shack TRS-80. With just 16KB of RAM and data stored on a tape recorder, Ken spent two years in a self-taught class learning to write game programs and automating the grading of standardized test scores for the school.
Ken went on to a small liberal arts school in Portland, Oregon—Lewis & Clark College—where a broad humanities education complemented his studies in business administration and computer science. He later earned master’s degrees from UCLA Anderson and the National University of Singapore, an academic path that mirrored a career unfolding across disciplines and continents.
Ken was intrigued by the interaction of computers and humans, as was evidenced by his undergraduate thesis “The Computer – An Invaluable Tool or Accomplice to Criminal Perfection?”
Ken learned Spanish at college and lived with a host family in Costa Rica for a semester. Later he would pick up Japanese and Mandarin.
The Global Career
Ken’s professional life has spanned nearly four decades, five continents, and multiple generations of technology.
He left Oregon at the start of his professional career, joining Electronic Data Systems through its rigorous three-year Systems Engineering Development program. Over the decades that followed, his work in technology took him to eight U.S. states and eight countries as places he called home, while extensive travel, often for work, carried him across forty-nine states and more than fifty countries.
For a decade, he held Asia-wide leadership responsibility, traveling widely throughout the region. These experiences shaped his deep global perspective and gave him firsthand insight into how humans deploy technology across cultures, economies, and societies.
Ken was a Partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers Consulting and Diamond Technology Partners. He lead all of Asia as the Managing Director of Experian Asia Pacific and spent nearly a decade at Amazon Web Services during the rise of modern cloud and AI platforms. Most recently, he led a very large IT department at Citi.
The Writing Passion
Long before writing novels, Ken was a reader. His love of books began early, sparked by his mother’s summer job as a small-town librarian, while hot summer nights spent sleeping beneath open skies taught him to dream big.
His writing is known for its distinctive voice and a poet’s eye for detail, blending realism, introspection, and wit. Over the course of his career, Ken has written extensively as a business executive and, for more than thirty-five years, has composed an annual poem that captures the spirit of each year in prose.
After thirty-nine years away, Ken returned to Oregon in 2024. He now writes from his cabin in the forests of Central Oregon, drawing on a lifetime of global and technology industry experience to examine the uneasy relationship between artificial intelligence and its human creators.
His debut novel, Dark Cloud, grew from that tension. Blending technical realism with character-driven storytelling. For Ken, fiction became a way to ask questions technology alone cannot answer. He is currently working on his second novel, focused on the human impact of agentic AI, while also writing essays for his AI-focused blog, AI Nexus.
The Renaissance Life
Away from consulting and manuscripts, Ken gravitates toward pursuits that reward patience, craft, and attention to detail. Fly fishing in the rivers and lakes of the Pacific Northwest remains a constant. He ties his own flies and enjoys the intellectual challenge of reading water, observing insect life, and fooling a lunker. Other than taking an occasional photo, all fish are released unharmed.
He enjoys cooking and continues to hone his craft across all types of cuisine. It’s not uncommon to find him cooking with a wok, bamboo steamer, tagine, or smoker. He considers recipes to be inspiration not directive.
Travel, particularly road trips and time spent outdoors hiking and cycling, offers a counterbalance to years of global air miles and conference rooms.
These hobbies share a common thread: they require presence, restraint, and an acceptance that some outcomes can’t be rushed or optimized. In a life shaped by technology and velocity, they provide a grounding reminder that not everything of value benefits from being faster.
Ken also has a passion for tea, as reflected by his online tea business, Bamboo Mist Tea.
Ken's Favorites
MOVIES
- Cinema Paradiso — directed by Giuseppe Tornatore
- Dances with Wolves — directed by Kevin Costner
BOOKS
Ken’s reading tastes are eclectic, spanning science, history, finance, and storytelling:
- The Fabric of the Cosmos — by Brian Greene
- The Boys in the Boat — by Daniel James Brown
- Guns, Germs, and Steel — by Jared Diamond
- The Intelligent Investor — by Benjamin Graham
- Why We Sleep — by Matthew Walker
- Lifespan — by David Sinclair
- The Code Breaker — by Walter Isaacson
- The Davinci Code — by Dan Brown
- The Client — by John Grisham
MUSIC
Ken’s musical tastes are equally wide-ranging. Long-time favorites include Stevie Nicks, Gordon Lightfoot, Gabrielle, Randy Crawford, Chris Stapleton, Blake Shelton, and Tom Grant.
Recently, Bon Iver, Olivia Dean, and Lainey Wilson have been on heavy rotation. The lyrics from “Honest Man” by Leon Lee King and “Are You Alright” by Lucinda Williams remain particularly haunting.
Read more about Ken’s career on LinkedIn.
Ken is available for consulting on AI, technology, or strategy.