Michael Santarcangelo
I work with people who are good at what they do.
The stakes are high, the environment keeps changing, and there is never enough time, information, energy or authority to do everything.
The requests keep coming. The work still has to get done. You are still on the hook to deliver value.
That is usually when people reach for me.
Capable people solve hard problems.
When it is a technology problem, they solve it. Sometimes the situation is different.
Technology gets tangled up with people, priorities, constraints, politics, timing and a pile of other work that still has to get done. It all moves at once, and it keeps changing as the requests pile up.
Grinding our way through stops being an option. Capable people can solve hard problems. They sure as hell cannot solve them all at once.
Communicate more? Better? That can help. But there is more to read than the explanation.
People do not recognize value from words alone. Value is a dialogue, not a declaration, and people read more than the words we choose.
We are wired to hit the ground running and start solving. But the person asking for the work may not be the person who needs to recognize its value. What people ask for, what they want and what they need can be different things.
So the first job is not solving. It is understanding.
That is where I tend to come in.
How I work
There is more than one place to look.
For thirty years, people have brought me problems with no clean name, no obvious owner and no single place to look for the answer.
I read across the business, the technology, the people and the competing priorities—what somebody asked for, what somebody else heard and what the situation is telling us that we have not put into words yet.
I work the read
I redraw the bounds when the current view hides something we need. I ask the hard questions and say the uncomfortable things.
The questions stay focused on the situation and what we can do about it. If you show me my read is wrong, good. Now we know more.
Kind, not nice
We keep what holds. We change what does not.
Then we move.
ValueSmith
That way of working became ValueSmith.
A philosophy and discipline for delivering value in a world built to overlook it.
Over time, the work organized itself around recurring parts of the situation. These are equal facets of the discipline, not steps to follow in order.
Make it visible
Forge clarity
Do good work
Finish it
Demonstrate value
Visibility is the precursor to clarity.
Seeing what is happening helps us understand what needs attention. That understanding helps us do useful work and make its value recognizable. Visibility and clarity alone do not establish its value.
The role
Consigliere.
That work also shaped the role I play when people bring me into their situations: trusted advisor, close counsel, outsider perspective with insider experience.
I get close enough to understand the context and the stakes, while keeping enough perspective to see what becomes hard to see from inside. I bring range across technology, business, people and everything tangled between them—and enough standing to ask the hard questions.
I bring a read we can question and revise together.
You keep the judgment, the decisions and responsibility for what you do next.
If this is the kind of counsel you want
Explore working with Michael.
See the ways we can begin with the situation in front of you.
The deeper story
What made this way of working.
If you want to know what made Michael Michael—and how three decades of questions, experiments and rebuilding became ValueSmith—the story continues below.
Where it came from
I have always been curious about damn near everything.
One of the best ways I know to learn is to share what I am seeing with other people and work through it with them. That can teach me a different way to understand something, show me a connection I missed or give me a better explanation for why something works.
I capture what I learn, even when I do not fully understand it yet. I sketch it out, build models, share them and see what holds up and what falls apart. I look for causal mechanisms, connections and patterns—where approaches converge and where they split.
Then I rebuild.
I have done that for most of my life.
For years, people showed up with a problem in one hand and a bag of cash in the other and said, “I think you are the guy who can help me with this.” I rarely said no.
Technology. Business. Strategy. Execution. Communication. Leadership. Situations with people, systems, politics and constraints, with no obvious place to start.
Some of it I got right. A lot of it I learned the hard way.
Over time, the range became part of the read. I have worked with vendors, inside companies, across the industry and alongside people carrying the accountability when things had to work. That gives me a lot of perspectives to draw from.
But experience does not make the read final. I care more about being less wrong than I do about being right. Show me something I missed and we look at it. Show me a better explanation and we test it. Show me a better way and I am interested.
No answer gets protected because it was mine.
The question that changed the work
One ask, back in 2004, changed the direction of the work.
A team doing excellent work was struggling to help other people see its value and act on what they were finding. The ask was simple: help them communicate it.
So I went back to first principles. I studied how people communicate, how they make sense of information, how context changes what lands and what has to happen before somebody else can understand what we already see clearly.
Then I built models, shared and taught them, and watched what happened. The work made a difference for the people I worked with. For me, it opened a much bigger line of inquiry.
What started as communication kept leading somewhere else.
Why can capable people struggle to recognize and explain the value of their own work? What makes something valuable in the first place? Why can the same work matter deeply to one person and barely register with another? Why does an answer that makes perfect sense to one person fall apart when somebody else has to assess it? Why do we jump from a problem straight into action without choosing a path? Why does friction consume so much of the value before the work is even finished?
I did not answer those questions all at once. I followed them for years.
Across different clients, problems, industries and parts of the work, the same thing kept happening: I would understand one layer well enough to use it, reality would expose another seam, and I would go back to work.
I mapped what I saw. Built things. Used them. Shared them. Learned. Then rebuilt.
I have never had much patience for formulas, rigid templates or somebody declaring their way is the way. Reality does not work like that. The same problem can require a different answer in a different situation. Different people can reach the same outcome through different paths. Sometimes what worked yesterday stops working because the ground moved.
The goal was never to create one right way. It was to find what proved durable without freezing it in place: enough structure to help us move, enough freedom to adapt it to the situation.
Fidelity to reality.
That became ValueSmith.
How that shows up with people
The same thing shaped how I work with people.
I am not interested in standing outside the situation and prescribing from a distance.
Before I suggest a course of action, I want to understand what is happening and what might be causing it. So I get close enough to understand the context and the stakes while keeping enough perspective to see what becomes hard to see from inside.
I ask questions. I redraw the bounds. I look for what is missing, what changed, what we may have accepted without examining and what the situation is telling us that we have not named yet.
Sometimes I push. Sometimes I wait.
Sometimes the useful move is to stop. Sometimes somebody says something they did not know they knew until they hear themselves say it. That can be more useful than me handing them an answer.
Sometimes the problem changes. Sometimes the next move does. Sometimes what was hard to explain becomes something they can carry into another room.
And sometimes the useful part shows up after we stop talking.
That is part of why I keep doing the work this way.
When you are ready
Explore working with Michael.
See the ways we can begin with the situation in front of you.